


Hold On

by squidmemesinc



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Brief non-graphic Overlord cameo, Canon Compliant, Gore, Humor, Other, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-03-07 02:13:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 40,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13424556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squidmemesinc/pseuds/squidmemesinc
Summary: After being exiled from the Lost Light, Drift's travels bring him into contact with an unlikely old acquaintance.[[Indefinite Hiatus]]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to what is probably my first, most genuine attempt at writing longfic more than ten years. I've been working on this so long I forgot Drift/Fulcrum/Misfire is absolutely not a ship people ever think about except me and my two friends, to whom this is dedicated, Squid and Ziggy. Thank you for all the inspiration and encouragement :)
> 
> I wanted to warn against reading this fic if you are relying on a happy ending, because it doesn't have one. This is fully intended to be painful, at the beginning definitely, and in the middle, sure, but at the end most assuredly. So if you can't handle your heartache... You really shouldn't be into Transformers at all, actually.
> 
> I also wanted to mention that I do know about [this right here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053092/chapters/2107865) and I did my best to stay away from the material covered in this fic. To my credit I did plan out everything that would happen in mine before I even knew about this. I hope it's different enough not to upset anyone, but in any case, you had the right idea, my friend.
> 
> And then credit to Jro for the lines of canon dialogue I borrowed.

_The element of surprise is the consolation prize of advantages. Overlord is too big, too powerful, too comically evil to be taken down by one well-aimed surprise hit, and that should go without saying. The only thing it really earns Drift this time is the chance to say some cool shit to Overlord about how he’s going to do his best to kill him. He supposes that has its merits. Going out on a bad line is objectively worse than going out on a good line. He doesn’t think anyone would disagree with that._

_Fighting against the odds is nothing new. It’s expected, even. There are few mechs who, more often than not, find themselves in a fair fight—or one in which they have the advantage—and Drift does not count himself among them. It seems like every time he draws his swords, he’s outnumbered or outgunned or outmatched in some way or another. It makes no difference that it’s two-to-one, even when the one packs the punch of about a million mechs. Drift’s encountered armies before. Overlord may be an army alone, but he’s also just one target to focus on, and that’s not nothing._

_Drift still has his determination and his own skills to bring to the table, and that’s not nothing either. Maybe he’s no match for Overlord, but he can slow him down. He has to. Because the other thing that’s the same in every fight, for every mech, is that the fear is still present underneath, bubbling under the surface. The fear that he could lose. The fear that Ratchet will get hurt because he loses, or that someone else will. The fear that the ship will just become another of the hundreds of Cybertronian-filled graves floating through space._

_And maybe the biggest fear comes from inside, knowing that he was part of the group that made the slaughter he’s trying to prevent possible. That’s why he’s responsible for doing whatever he can to take care of Overlord personally._

_There’s no time to wonder how this happened, who slipped up, who’s to blame. There’s no time to wonder why they let this happen, why they thought their plan was good enough, safe enough. Why they listened to_ Prowl. _To be frustrated at whoever had the final say. This isn’t the moment to wonder if Brainstorm and Chromedome are dead, and who else might have joined them before Drift had shown up._

_The outcome of the fight doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter that he knows Overlord is playing with them, pretending to react sluggishly to their most wholehearted attacks, while wearing a big, perverse grin on his face, eyes mad with bloodlust._

_Ratchet’s aid, his presence, his words—‘_ Your sword, your faith, and your friend’— _invigorate Drift_. _His Great Sword swims in his spark aura, more brilliant and glowing brighter than it ever has. He’s living moment-to-moment in the hyper-focused meditative state required to properly wield his weapon. Time slows in this state, and filters out of his attention, for it’s not a necessary construct in this battle. The only thing thing he needs to pay attention to is Overlord, where’s Overlord, where is Drift in relation and how does he move without colliding, how does he deflect, how does he damage, how does he buy more time. Because help is coming, and if they can hold out, they_ will _get this under control._

 _He can think of so many foes he’s faced that would have been felled by a close enough_ miss _from this weapon, in this state. But of course, not this one._

_And it doesn’t matter, because even if they don’t beat Overlord, they can distract him, slow him down, give the others time to catch up. It’ll be a joint effort to save as many lives as they can, but it’ll more than likely be someone else who will live to regret this mistake he’s had a hand in._

_Drift has thought about his own death before. It’s a reality everyone is forced to face, but beyond accepting that it could happen to anyone he knows, he’s also ready to accept that it could happen to him at any time. Fights are not created equal, but that doesn’t mean an easy foe is a guaranteed win. One wrong move, one slip up and you’re dead, no matter if this is how you planned to die or not. And of course, this holds true for engaging a Phase Sixer with the ship’s medic._

_That doesn’t change the fact that it’d be better not to go out at all. There’s a lot at stake now, and there’s a lot he has to do, things he wanted to do—and being taken down by one of his most grievous errors in judgement at this point in his timeline isn’t one of them._

_The means don’t have to be satisfying to the end. The universe doesn’t work that way. That’s not how Primus’ plans are drawn out. When you go, you go. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to fight it as hard as he can._

_And still, Drift’s resolve shatters in an instant when out of the edge of his hyper-focused consciousness, he hears a loud crack of metal colliding. Ratchet flies into the wall and collapses, gun skittering out of his hand and sliding out of reach. That doesn’t even matter, because when Ratchet hits the ground, he doesn’t move._

_Drift thought they’d have more time to stall._

_But Overlord has gotten bored of playing with them._

_It’s Wing all over again. Ratchet is down, hurt, possibly dead, and Drift’s aura flares around his sword. With a yell that shakes him down to his spark, he leaps in front of him and swings his sword at Overlord with enough force to fell a building._

_Sometimes he wonders if Primus wants him to stop believing._

_He puts everything he has into the attack, and it does little more than put a chink into Overlord’s armor, and it allows Overlord an opportunity to pluck him out of the air, lifting him by the neck and applying no small amount of pressure as Drift’s Great Sword slips from his fingers._

_Fine, but Overlord is not getting Ratchet, no matter what._

_There are other ways to buy time._

_“Pesky little thing, aren’t you?” Overlord coos, cocking his head to the side as he regards Drift squirming in his grip. “How endearing.”_

_With his hands around Overlord’s massive fingers, he has enough leverage to operate his vocalizer. “Get melted, cogsucker,” Drift hisses, figuring he can’t possibly comprehend how much he’ll regret this provocation in a few seconds, but finding at this very moment, he doesn’t care._

_Overlord’s lips curve up into a sadistic smile. “Cheeky,” he says. “I always wondered why Megatron felt the needs to keep little pets like you. Maybe he has more of a sense of humor than I’d thought.”_

_Drift catches sight of Ratchet, broken and leaking energon, stirring against the wall. He’s conscious again, and as his optics flicker on, he notices Drift in Overlord’s grip._

Stay down, _Drift prays in vain, trying to catch his eye._

_Ratchet does not stay down, but moves for his gun. He raises a hand to fire another shot at Overlord, which, while well-aimed, glances off his enhanced armor like the others and does little more than draw his attention. Overlord swats Ratchet again and Drift kicks out wildly in a futile attempt to stop it. His spark pulses madly in his chest at the image of the fresh injuries on Ratchet’s frame._

_“Enough of that,” Overlord purrs at a broken, shaking Ratchet, ignoring Drift as flails around wildly. “Sit quietly and watch while I teach your friend some manners.”_

_Drift vividly makes out Ratchet’s face through the smoke, yelling,_

BEEEEEEEP.

.

.

.

 _“An inquiry?” Drift stands in the doorway, hoping he looks as incredulous as he feels. Nothing is helped by the fact that the fresh repairs leave him feeling unsteady on his feet, inside out, upside down, inverted to the nth dimension. “An_ inquiry? _” He says it again, applying pressure to the offending concept._

 _Rodimus drags him inside and locks the door. “I had to do_ something! _People were asking questions! And what do you do if you want to stall things? You launch an inquiry.” He slumps into his chair, and Drift feels the guilt radiating off of him. It’s a guilt he shares. “An inquiry into something_ I’m _responsible for,” Rodimus mutters. “Oh god. Oh god, I feel sick. I’ve messed up big time.”_

_Rodimus looks so quiet and sullen—not his usual sulk when something doesn’t go his way, but genuine anxiety. Drift knows how much pressure he puts on himself to be the captain everyone needs, to live up to Optimus’ tall shadow. Overlord hadn’t been a part of that urge, but maybe there’s a chance he had thought it would work out for the best, despite the misgivings they’d all shared._

_Rodimus has his fingertips pressed into his closed optics and his frame is tense even sprawled in his chair, and it brings to a head something Drift has been thinking about for a long time. Something he’d always thought he might have to do._

_“I can sort this out, Rodimus. Honestly, I can fix this.”_

_Rodimus drops his hands back down to the arms of his chair and looks up at Drift wearily. “This is my fault, not yours. We were standing in Prowl’s office, and he was trying to convince me that bringing Overlord onboard was ‘right and proper,’ and you called me an idiot for even considering it.” He tries to smile and thinks better of it._

_“Was I that blunt?” Drift wonders vacantly._

_“I don’t know why he even let you in on those discussions in the first place,” Rodimus says, face contorting now as he thinks of Prowl in distaste. “It’s not like he trusts you.”_

_Anger suddenly bubbles up in Drift’s intake, a heavy, nauseous feeling as he instantly realizes what Prowl was doing. He feels a lash of reluctance to take to the idea that had occurred to him moments ago, knowing Prowl had calculated it as a possible outcome and decided it was the most acceptable course of action._

_“I’ll tell you exactly why he wanted me there,” Drift mutters. “It was in case something like this happened. Need a scapegoat? Get an ex-Decepticon.”_

_Rodimus’ face shifts into a shared anger, and this is a small comfort to Drift. “Well, it’s not gonna happen,” Rodimus says sternly, rising out of his chair with a newfound surety. “I’m taking the fall for this one. Your name doesn’t have to come into it. It’s taken you years to win back people’s trust, and you’re not throwing it all away on my behalf.”_

It isn’t fair _, Drift thinks, watching Rodimus with a sad kind of fondness. “Rodimus, if you tell the crew what you’ve done, then that’s it. The quest’s over. We’ll never find the Knights.”_

_“No, it just means someone else will take over. You, maybe? Ratchet? I dunno. Someone.”_

_He’s convinced this is the thing to do, but he doesn’t know what Drift knows. Drift clenches his fists by his side, stifling the confusing images of the vision that his processor threatens to recall. “But someone_ doesn’t _take over!”_

_Rodimus looks up sharply. “‘Doesn’t’?”_

_Drift bites his lip, not having wanted to share this for fear he might not be taken seriously. “Won’t.”_

_Rodimus keeps pressing him. “You said ‘doesn’t.’ What d’you mean, ‘doesn’t’?”_

_“It’s hard to explain what I mean.” Drift unclips his Great Sword and places it on the desk. “You remember when I nearly died, back on Cybertron? I was within feet of Vector Sigma.”_

_“Yes…” says Rodimus slowly, unsure where this is going, not looking too keen on finding out._

_Drift’s fingers trail over the sword affetionately. He’s glad it wasn’t lost in the fight. “When I put this sword through my spark, I saw something.”_

_Rodimus sidles in nearer to him, his shoulder brushing Drift’s own and making Drift’s spark ache. “What, like a vision?” His voice is soft when he speaks._

_“Kind of,” Drift murmurs. “More a sense of how things would play out. It was abstract and it was fleeting and every time I call it to mind it becomes harder to interpret, but something is around the corner, Rodimus—” He turns and takes Rodimus’ hand in his own, feeling desperate for the warmth of his metal against his own; so sure now of what he has to do, so reluctant to do it, yet also so willing if it means Rodimus will go on. “—and a year from now, or 50 years from now, that something will arrive, and we won’t be able to stop it unless we find the Knights. And I don’t care if you think, ‘Oh, that’s just Drift being Drift,’ because I’m convinced that you need to remain in charge.”_

_He puts his other hand over the back of Rodimus’ and focuses on that, rather than his captain’s face. “People can come and go—they can die—but you have to be here, otherwise we will fail. And so the simple solution—the only solution—is that I take the blame for this.”_

_He looks up, and Rodimus’ face is set hard. There’s stubbornness there along with the pain, but the pain is the part that cuts so deep, as visible as it is. The burden of being believed in, of having sacrifices made for him, to have a sacrifice made for him in his best interests._

_“I won’t let you do this for me,” Rodimus says._

_“I’m not doing it for you,” Drift replies, smile wavering, squeezing Rodimus’ fingers in his own. “I’m doing it for everyone else.”_

_There’s a long pause and Rodimus pulls his hand free so he can place both on either side of Drift’s helm, bringing their foreheads in to touch. There’s an almost imperceptible quiver to the stillness, but his voice is steady when he speaks. “Drift, I_

BEEEEEEEP.

.

.

.

_There’s a noticeable pause before Rodimus begins speaking. “It gives me no pleasure to stand here, in front of you all, and say what I’m about to say.”_

_The eyes of hundreds of Autobots gaze up at them. Some of them look angry. Others are sad. Most of them look like they’ve been through too much to feel anything else at this moment. This is just a motion to go through._

_“But I promised you an inquiry; I said I would find out how Overlord got on board, and who was to blame.”_

_Drift’s spark is surprisingly still, resigned; perhaps out of necessity. He knows this had been his idea, and it was only accepted because he’d insisted on it. It’s an idea that’s been present ever since he switched sides, native in his processor due to the other failed attempts at belonging that tells him to jump ship and form his own designation, to stop trying to fit in with others’. Maybe it wouldn’t have been Overlord, but eventually he might have realized of his own accord that the Autobot brand didn’t quite fit right to cover the exact shape of his past._

_“A few hours ago, Drift admitted full responsibility for what happened. It seems as if, prior to takeoff, and with the help of the Duobots, he was able to attach Overlord’s cell onto the ship.”_

_Rodimus is giving this speech well, considering it wasn’t practiced or discussed in depth. Drift supposes it wouldn’t be too difficult, given that the only modifications to the truth are exclusions of names._

_“He’d hoped we could use him to make our own Phase Sixers. Yes, I know the war’s over, but he says he was preparing for the worst.”_

_Well, other than that. Prowl’s motive had been attributed to him just to keep the characters involved simple. To wrap everything up nicely, cleanly, so that everyone remaining on the Lost Light could have their closure for this terrible experience._

_“He accepts that he acted irresponsibly, even if it was in the interests of the Autobot cause.”_

_To many, this probably sounds like something a former Decepticon would do, or what Drift specifically would; some bots seem to be of the mind that he hasn’t learned how to separate his actions from the toxic Decepticon rhetoric, or maybe more accurately, Megatron’s twisted vision of how to achieve the overall good that they once all hoped to achieve. Whatever got lost when tyranny became the road to peace._

_It seems a minor point to be focusing on in the midst of what’s really happening, but he can’t help but feel a surge of bitterness towards whatever part Megatron had played in leading him to this point. It’s an irrelevant and petty emotion; any reasonable mech would admit that’s just displaced aggression rising out of a difficult situation. But disregarding his personal involvement with the Decepticon commander, it’s almost a trope amongst modern Autobots to blame Megatron for misfortune of any magnitude, something cast about randomly as a joke, often avoiding the bite of truth in it by broadcasting laughter louder._

_But without Megatron, would there have even been Overlord?_

_Without Megatron, would there be Drift?_

_There’s muttering in the audience, reaching Drift’s audials like a crescendoing roar of static._

_Rodimus gives a small pause, and Drift hears him intake from where he stands on the platform. “And if it sounds like I’m defending him, I’m not. I’m appalled at what he’s done. He says he will accept whatever punishment I deem appropriate.”_

_The captain finally turns to him, and this, more than the hundreds of other bots below, makes Drift feel as if he’s being scrutinized. Rodimus’ back is to the crowd, and Drift can see the disappointment in Rodimus’ eyes. Not as if he believes this story he’s telling, but that Drift suggested he tell it in the first place, and convinced him that it was his only option. And perhaps more potent, a disappointment in himself for failing to protect his friend from their shared mistake._

_Recognizing this might be the last time he sees Rodimus’ face, Drift averts his eyes._

_The noise is growing, threatening to drown out Rodimus’ voice. He raises it to accommodate, and Drift supposes this is the last courtesy Rodimus can offer him. To see that the trial and procedure is carried out as it should be._

_“Drift, do you have anything to say before I strip you of your Autobrand and order you to leave the ship?”_

_Drift’s intake stalls. He powers through it. He stops hearing the noise, hears instead nothing but himself, echoing in an empty room. “No, Captain.”_

_“In that case—” Rodimus’ hand comes up, and Drift swears feeling him strike the brand from his chest is more painful than anything he suffered at the hands of Overlord. “—I hereby revoke the rite of Autobrand and_ **cast you out** _. A shuttle has been prepared. You leave_ **immediately**. _"_

_There’s an uproar. Of course no one gets in his way—on the contrary, they part a wide path for him—but he’s jostled and shoved as he moves towards the shuttle. He doesn’t respond, steeling himself, centering his attention around his spark as he walks the long walk. The noise fades again, and he passes the point where no one’s been allowed to crowd around the shuttle. Something is thrown, hits him, and he stumbles._

_Drift feels a horrible pang in his spark when he sees Ratchet offering him a hand. Of course, he’d thought extensively about leaving Rodimus, mourning that forfeited friendship in the time he’d had allotted to the task. But perhaps equally painful were the others he’d left behind, chief amongst them Ratchet.  As he looks up at the medic, a rush of thoughts and emotions threaten to keep him down, but he forces himself to let Ratchet pull him up. Neither of them smile, and while Ratchet is still wearing his ever-present frown, something about the lack of depth to it seems a little grimmer to Drift than if he were to actually_ look _angry or upset._

_Ratchet’s grip on Drift’s hand is surprisingly strong, and something about that makes Drift want to call the thing off. Panic floods him now and he grips the medic’s hand tightly. “Ratchet—” he starts helplessly, having nothing to say. What would even be appropriate? What would even be appropriate? ‘Thanks for all you’ve done.’ ‘Sorry I wasted your advice.’ Or simply, ‘Goodbye’?_

_Ratchet is similarly lost for words. He squeezes Drift’s hand, and at the last moment before letting go, he opens his mouth to say something,_

BEEEEEEEP.

Drift jolts out of a tumultuous recharge, nearly dislodging himself from the slab. His processor aches in his head and he feels as if he’s got a hangover, though of course he doesn’t. That’s just how recharge has been coming to him these last few weeks. He stumbles off the berth and moves the short distance to the navigation panel, throwing himself into the seat and switching off autopilot with fumbling fingers, searching the panel for the source of the noise. After a scan of the dashboard, he spots a low fuel indicator.

Drift groans. He’d been planning on picking up fuel at his next stop, but he wasn’t expecting to have to deal with a condescending little light flashing and beeping for the next day until he made it there.

Drift checks on the other systems of the shuttle, just to see if it can get any worse, and immediately notes something strange. The navigation shows him passing a planet called Varas Extrinsecus, which he knows to have hosted a battle or two during the war. Supposedly it’s a wasteland, but his sensors are picking up six life signs below, apparently Cybertronian in origin. With a bit of frustration, Drift notes that apparently this shuttle isn’t equipped to distinguish energy signals and cross-reference with known databases, rendering these mechs strangers. The memory banks storing that information are inexplicably missing.

The planet is visible through the windshield, as the shuttle hovers just out of orbit. It’s mostly orange, with a strange speckled mass of black along one side of it. It doesn’t look like a very inviting place to land. He pulls up records on Varas Extrinsecus, trying to see if he can find any recent records of colonization, but everything seems to end at the most recent slaughter a few hundred years ago, and marks the planet as uninhabited. There’s no mention of colonizing or cleanup. There’s very few other reasons Drift can imagine Cybertronians might want to land on some unfamiliar dead planet, and even fewer that call for a crew of six. The most likely scenario sticking out in his head right now is that whoever these six are, they’ve been stranded on this desolate rock with no way of getting help for Primus knows how long.

He checks the fuel again, debating.

Upon being ostracized from the Lost Light, and from the Autobrand, Drift’s new mission has been, essentially, his old one. Wing had always insisted that the most important thing one could do was help others who were in need, so without any other kind of purpose in mind, Drift had set out to do that, for anyone he encountered. Of course he knows what’s past is past, but even so it’s still difficult to reconcile with the consequences his actions had caused on the Lost Light, no matter who else should share the blame, and no matter what other factors came into play. No matter that none of it could be changed or avoided or undone now. In his spark he felt a need to compensate, to cover the wound of the wrong with as much right as he could.

The shuttle isn’t big enough to carry seven mechs, but he could spare enough fuel to set down and drop off extra supplies. Then he could move on to fuel up his own ship, restock, and hire someone to get these six bots off the wasteland of a planet they’re stranded on, and get them back to Cybertron. He wonders how long they’ve been stuck there… It’s possible they haven’t even heard that the war’s ended yet.

That could potentially be an issue, Drift notes as he begins to plot in a course to land on Varas Extrinsecus. It might be better to land at a distance and observe them first, get a sense of their allegiance, and perhaps more importantly, their attitudes. He could potentially scrounge up a bit of extra fuel from the fallen ships around and be on his way, if needed. If it seems like they won’t be receptive to his help, he’ll be on his way.

.

.

.

The planet, on its surface, is drier and dustier than it had looked from space. The soil that coats the whole planet is a burnt sort of orange, a few shades off of rust, and there’s no signs of discernable life around as far as the optic can see.

What there are is dead Cybertronians, lying in heaps. Piles of gutted mechs, stray limbs torn asunder; and then the odd body with a blast through the head or the spark, with no other discernible wounds on him. Energon has leaked into the soil around the bodies here, turning it a dark, hard, crusted brown. Corpses lie on plateaus of cracked rock, or have been thrown to the bottom of deep chasms, and the stench of corroded metal rises and sits thick and stagnant on the windless face of this dead planet.

It’s not especially unusual in this part of the galaxy.

Drift travels across the landscape in his alt mode, towards the six life signs pointed out by his ship’s scanners, cycling through prayers for the dead as he passes in his head, for whatever good that’ll do.

As he draws nearer to the coordinates he’d marked, he transforms to hide his approach better, sneaking from one pile of gore to the next.

Drift moves up an outcropping of hard, craggy rock, hoping to get a better vantage point on these mysterious Cybertronians. From up high, he can see quite a deal more of what’s below. The sight is a landscape of death, ruined bodies scattering a red canvas. Farther out, the bodies grow closer together, until at the horizon, it appears black. This is the freckled mass visible from space—one of many visible wounds the Cybertronians’ war has left on the landscape of the galaxy.

Amidst the carnage, two spots move, and Drift confirms they are not only Cybertronian, but Decepticon, judging from the badges they’re sporting. One of them appears to have some kind of rotors on his back, and towers over the other, whose alt-mode Drift can’t get a sense of. Something about the posturing of the smaller one indicates he might be anxious or unsure, though it doesn’t seem as if the one with the rotors notices or minds. He watches them as they engage with each other, slowly walking from heap to heap of bodies and poking around.

It occurs to Drift, as he wonders what they’re doing, that they could have survived on this planet by scavenging fuel from the dead. Though an unappetizing prospect, Drift can’t be too judgemental, having been in similar situations himself for much of his first few centuries after onlining.

He peers over the landscape, searching for the other life signs, and eventually lands on one he’d apparently missed. This mech appears to be reclining against the husk of a small craft, and Drift had mistaken him for a corpse until he noted his foot bobbing up and down in leisure. This apparently while he talks to someone else, hidden behind a large mass shielding him from Drift’s view.

Drift watches this one for a long time. He would almost guess this guy was K-Class, from his build, but he doesn’t see how that could be. If he was K-Class, he probably should have detonated by now. But he is pretty far away, so it’s hard to tell if his assumptions are correct. If he is K-Class, he is, of course, also a Decepticon.

The war is over, but especially if these mechs haven’t heard that, Drift isn’t keen on the idea of helping Decepticons off the planet. There’s a potential outcome in which they could ultimately do more harm than good if he gave them an exit route, depending on how seriously they take Megatron’s later preachings.

Maybe this automatic attitude of distrust is just his own personal bias, and maybe it’s something that he should be throwing out now that the war’s over in the interest of doing his part to foster peace between all members of the Cybertronian race.

But Drift knows from past experience that allegiance matters. Even if you swear to change your ways and do your best, people’s expectations are as good as self-fulfilling prophecies. How others see you is important. It always has been.

He supposes that’s even more of a reason to give these Cons the benefit of the doubt.

Drift tries to fight down his bias and observe neutrally before he makes a decision.

After several long minutes, the K-Class(?) stands, and the other who he was talking to emerges from the pile of bodies.

Drift, unthinking, peeks up a little higher over the rock to get a better look. He could swear that was—

A blast takes out a chunk of the rock a few meters from his head and he winces back down. He listens, spark pounding, for signs that he’s been discovered, although he surely has, given he was just attacked. But he doesn’t hear rotors, and he doesn’t hear a jet. That had been Misfire! He’s sure of it. But he has to get another look. What could Misfire be doing on this planet with this ragtag bunch? Would the other two missing mechs complete this confusing picture?

He debates leaving, but knowing that if they had noticed him, they’d be on the lookout for anyone making a run for it, he hedges his bets on staying put. Instead, Drift carefully shifts around the rock to get another, more obscured vantage point to peek out of. The one with the rotors is holding a gun, talking to the anxious one again. The K-Class, and, yes, that’s _definitely_ Misfire, are walking over. The anxious one is yelling at the one with the rotors. The K-Class says something. Misfire laughs. The one with the rotors shrugs. They aren’t looking towards the cliffs. In fact, they’re all walking off towards a pile of wreckage, as if the shooting incident hadn’t been intentional or merited any sort of investigation.

Drift wonders if anyone had really noticed him, or if it had just been a random act of violence against the rock. His spark is still thrumming with anxiety, but no one is coming towards him, and they don’t even seem to be especially aware that the blast had occurred at all. It looked as if they were just having an argument, rather than a discussion of potential enemy presence and the launch of an attack.

He watches them, trying to figure it out, and realizes the wreckage they’re walking towards is actually a ship. Drift had assumed it wasn’t functional, given the state of it, even compared to some of the others that surely aren’t functioning. But the four of them walk towards it, board, and take off, rising into the bright light of the sun for this planet, and disappearing from view.

So… Not in need of a rescue. And apparently there won’t be much of an opportunity for him to catch up with Misfire. Not that he’s sure he wants to, given their history. From his own recollection of the events, and without knowing what happened after he’d left, he has no idea what Misfire thinks of him. But he wouldn’t be surprised if Misfire knew what he knew and wasn’t exactly prepared to go out for an engex with him.

Either way, the point is past debate. The ship has taken off, and Drift can’t get a read on it with any of his own sensors, so he assumes it’s on its way out of orbit. He can check back in the shuttle, but if their craft takes off, it doesn’t follow that they’d need his help. It had been a short enough period between the others boarding and the craft starting up that he feels sure in assuming the pilot was the fifth lifesign, and so the sixth must have been on board as well. He supposes it’s a comfort to know that Misfire at least is alive, given the odds he could not have been over the course of their four million year war. Alive, and in the company of like-minded folks, apparently.

Hm.

Drift transforms again and zooms off into the dusty landscape, unwilling to pass up a somewhat rare opportunity to make use of his alt mode, and heads back towards his own transport. Misfire and his new companions are still on his mind as he drives.

The ride back is dry and bright and hot and empty. He takes a leisurely route back, simultaneously comforted and anxious to know he’s the only life sign left on this planet, Cybertronian or otherwise.

The massive grave covering a large portion of the planet’s surface serves as a cause of unease. No matter how old he gets, Drift can’t shake the first images of death he ever encountered from his mind. Far too soon after onlining, he’d been forced to face the reality of that for the citizens of his society, and consequently the possibility of that outcome for himself.

For a while it scared him, and then it frustrated him more than he could reasonably describe, and now he just bears it with a quiet kind of sadness.

It’s hard to believe the war is over, and that this kind of thing won’t be normal anymore. Maybe. For now, the bodies haven’t stopped dropping. There’s still evil out there. There are still rogue Decepticons, for one. Drift isn’t naive enough to believe that the conclusion of the war means the end of their troubles.

There are also countless other alien races, organizations (the Galactic Council among them) who bear hostility towards Cybertronians, regardless of if their armor bears a red badge or a purple badge or no badge at all. Cybertronians are a target for the whole galaxy, whether its from their own kind or others who have suffered at the hands of their conflict.

And it’s not only Drift’s own kind that’s afflicted by evil.

The fact is, there’s room for good anywhere you look, wherever evil has filled in the spaces, and Drift has made good his cause. He might not be able to erase his own past, but he can write his future.

He climbs into his shuttle, pondering his new mission, beginning the startup sequence. The shuttle barely hums to life, uttering one loud peep of the low fuel warning, before it explodes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sort of wanted to wait until Wednesday to post this in case anything new and relevant came up, but I think I'm too impatient.
> 
> Please forgive my corny jokes, and I promise not every chapter is going to start with some cryptic shit in italics.

_Cybertron glows all around him in the early morning light. Wild buildings curl up on the periphery of his vision, their spires like tendrils reaching for Primus’ embrace. There’s brilliance all around that reflects directly into his optics, making it hard to see._

_He tilts his gaze upwards. Their little star is on a slow climb upwards today—or, maybe downwards. He can’t tell if it’s dusk or dawn, he can’t tell what direction he’s facing or what city he’s in, if it’s a city at all or just tessellating cybermatter rising up all around him, and it’s too blinding to look directly at anyway. He basks in the raw, red light for hours and hours and it barely shifts, but the city continues to sparkle around him. Yellows and oranges burn in a thin band on the horizon, drowning out the natural hue of the sky._

_This Cybertron is off, though, and it’s a feeling the presses harder on him the more he resists acknowledging it. This isn’t the peace he normally feels when it’s as if he’s alone on the planet, watching the sun rise or set. There’s nowhere to look that doesn’t threaten to burn his optics out. And there’s a noise—a buzzing and crackling that started soft and grows louder now. Louder and louder, and something’s now blotting out the sun on the horizon, growing and shifting as it approaches._

_There’s a sense of dread with the impending arrival of this cloud. Drift feels himself transform, he feels himself rolling backwards, but it feels gripless, like he’s slipping off the face of the planet. And still the sun doesn’t move, but the cloud spreads all around it, all around_ him _, and suddenly the light sours to an unnatural neon green peeking through the gaps in the cloud. There’s no more Cybertron, no more brilliance, no m_

Warnings and errors spew across his HUD, sputtering frantic lines about various system failures and other malfunctions. Drift doesn’t even attempt to parse them, distracted by the considerable pain plaguing apparently every sensory receptor he has. None of his systems are responding to his calls to movement, and whether that’s because of the extreme amounts of pain he’s in, or because his limbs are no longer attached, he doesn’t know. So that doesn’t bode well.

For whatever reason, his optics and his hearing are still functioning. The crackling and popping from his shuttle isn’t quite loud enough to be immediate, but what he does hear indicates a steady blaze, and he can see the smoke billowing up from his right. The remaining fuel and energon reserves he’d had stocked go up in flames, while he lies here, apparently dying. He tries to activate his vocalizer to utter a prayer, and finds that system has shut down too, and so resorts to running through them in his head again.

After a minute, he hears footsteps approach. From the sound of it, three, maybe four of the Decepticons he’d noticed earlier. They’re standing outside his periphery (his visual field is flooded with static and flickering spots anyway), and he can’t tell which of them are surrounding him.

“This guy’s not with the DJD,” says one voice. “He’s unaligned.”

“Unaligned are cowards,” another says, accompanied by some kind of mysterious clicking noise, the source of which he can’t place. It hadn’t sounded like something coming from a vocalizer, or an accent. “No offense.”

There’s no response to this comment, but Drift isn’t really paying attention. His panicking processor swims with information overload from his own failing frame, making it difficult to try to sort through what might be happening. The Decepticons had noticed him. They must have beaten him back to his shuttle and planted explosives, then taken off and waited until he fell into their trap. He hadn’t noticed, and he now berates himself for his naive carelessness. He should have checked. He should have _thought_. But there’s nothing he can do about that now. Speaking of stupid ways to die.

“That’s not an Autobot, you idiots. Don’t you recognize him?” comes a third voice, this one with a distinct, gravelly rasp and maybe an edge of panic.

“No. Why?”

“It’s _Deadlock_.”

There’s an immediate sound of scrambling, so hasty that it results it sounds like someone trips and falls, then struggles to stand back up and put further distance between themselves and Drift, who is more than a little peeved that he’s dying and therefore unable to correct his mistaken identity.

In the distance, Drift hears Misfire shout victoriously.

Someone leans over him—the big one with the rotors. He doesn’t touch Drift, but his optics seem to focus intently on him. Drift can’t even tell what his face or his body are doing, other than leaking energon and gradually shutting down. He wonders when he’ll lose the choppy audio and visual that he has.

“He’s dying,” announces Rotors, who is the fourth voice. This is the first thing he’s contributed to the conversation.

“We killed him?” the first voice asks. He sounds almost worried.

“That’s not what dying means,” Rotors replies. He turns his head to look at another of them, removing his focus from Drift as he hangs his elbows over his knees. “Who’s Deadlock?”

Drift is struck with a sudden urge to laugh, and it must trigger some kind of unfelt reaction in his body, because he hears a terrible cracking noise and the others around him go jumpy again, judging from the sound of shifting on rock, and he can see Rotors nearly fall backwards. A fresh hemorrhaging of warnings streams down, too fast for him to even process them, not that he’s bothering anyway. It’s not going to be good news.

“Spinister, are you kidding?” the first voice asks, moving a little closer to peer at Drift as well. This close up, he can tell it’s the K-Class, and that the K-Class is actually that, as mystifying as that is. Along with the fact that Rotors is called Spinister, that makes two pretty much useless facts he’s finding out as he’s on the brink of death.

There’s a beat of silence as Spinister apparently attempts to recall. “Is he an actor?” Drift supposes he should be thankful for this person.

“He’s a traitor, and a vicious murderer,” says the grumpy voice who’d identified him. “He used to be a Decepticon, but then he defected and joined the Autobots.” The voice pauses, then continues in a quieter voice, “Some people think he’s a mole, but there’s no evidence to support that.”

“How do you even know all of that?” asks Clicker with a bored sort of judgement to his tone.

“I’m active on the forums,” Grumpy mutters. “Anyway, who _cares!_ Why are we still standing here? We should get away from him and this planet before he decides not to be dying anymore.”

“Yeah, he’s not gonna do that,” Spinister announces, sounding confident. _Great_ , Drift thinks.

Misfire, still at a distance, shouts something at the four standing over Drift’s soon-to-be corpse, but Drift can’t make it out, and no one near him acknowledges it. The sixth lifesign is still unaccounted for, not that Drift intends on following up on the mystery, given the situation.

“Why would _Deadlock_ be all the way out here?” K-Class wants to know. “You really think he was hunting us?”

“Maybe he’s in league with the DJD,” says Clicker. “If he’s a mole.”

“I don’t think he’s a mole…” Grumpy says very quietly, and very grumpily.

Drift can’t believe he survived Overlord to be blown up by a group of idiots.

There’s a sound from somewhere behind Spinister, and Misfire comes tumbling into hearing range. “You guys are missing a great shuttle fire.” No one responds in the few milliseconds of a window he gives, and he continues, coming up next to Spinister. “What are you looking at, pinhead? More ghosts?” There’s another brief pause when he follows Spinister’s line of sight. “Whoa, that’s Deadlock!”

“Yeah, we know, thanks for pointing out the obvious,” Clicker snaps.

“You guys didn’t recognize him at first.” Grumpy seems to do a lot of muttering.

“No, shut up, I mean it’s _Deadlock._ We go way back!” Drift feels a glimmer of hope for the first time. Apparently Misfire has a fond enough memory of him to mention their past. Or at least, judging from the intonation he’s using, he’s not upset about their parting terms. As baffling as that is to Drift, Misfire doesn’t have any reason to lie to _them_ if Drift is completely incapacitated. He tries to summon any kind of faculties in his frame at all to signal, but so many things have shut down at this point, he doubt he does anything more impressive than leak energon a bit faster.

“You know him?” K-Class asks.

“No he doesn’t, he just thinks he does,” Clicker says dismissively.

“Get fragged, Krok,” Misfire says, addressing Clicker. “We used to be buds at camp, before assignments. We used to prank people. Deadlock always had great ideas for pranks. One time Starscream was visiting to do some kind of recruitment program, and I never thought we’d be able to pull this off, but Deadlock had this idea to—”

“Krok…maybe we shouldn’t let Misfire’s friend die,” K-Class suggests.

Yes!

“He’s not Misfire’s friend, _Fulcrum_ , he’s _Deadlock_ ,” insists Grumpy.

Pit!

“He’s dying?” Misfire asks, frowning down at him. “Bummer.”

 _Misfire, come on,_ Drift thinks.

“How long has he got, Spinister?” Krok asks.

Drift’s tactile receptors shut off in that moment, which, while it’s a relief on his physical strain because he’s no longer in pain, is a bit of a stressor on him mentally, because it means he’s on the edge of death. It is, however, getting really difficult to focus on this conversation, now that death is beckoning so loudly.

“Maybe like twenty minutes.”

“So not enough time for you to save him?” continues Krok.

“ _Why_ are you considering this? He’ll just turn around and murder us, or sell us out to the Autobots,” Grumpy says.

“I feel kind of bad for blowing him up,” K-Class says. “I really don’t think he was hunting us. He’s not even wearing an Autobrand...”

“You feel bad for blowing up Deadlock! And now that we’ve given him a reason to murder us, you want to save him!”

“Nineteen minutes,” Spinister interjects.

Misfire speaks up again. “Frag you too, Crankcase. Me and Deadlock are buddies. He’d think this was a great prank and just laugh it off. Trust me. Spinister, patch him up.”

This is such a strange situation. Drift’s never been so confused when he’s been about to die before. Usually it’s a lot more straightforward than this. And usually the bad guys are a lot more intentional. And...competent.

“Gotcha.” There’s the sound of creaking metal as the Spinister kneels over him and starts gathering him up. Drift’s HUD alerts him that his hearing is going to shut off, which he realizes as soon as one audial goes silent. The static on his visual feed is getting worse and worse, too, and it’s almost completely obscured by HUD warnings.

“We didn’t need to waste all that nice energon in his shuttle blowing him up if we were just gonna put him back together in the end,” Grumpy bot—Crankcase—points out. Drift hears flat warning tone, knowing what comes next, and also knowing that his life is at the mercy of these five strangers, and Misfire. He spins through another quick, vehement prayer for the hell of it.

Misfire snorts. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you listened to _Spinister_ telling you he saw someone.”

“There was _someone_ ,” Crankcase points out.

“Yeah, well, all I’m saying is maybe we should try to check more often if the people we’re blowing up are people we know. As long as they don’t want us dead, I mean.”

“Right, as long as they don’t want us dead. You know, sometimes I wonder if any of you ever listen to me.”

“What?” There’s a loud _hrmpf!_ as Crankcase apparently stomps away from Misfire. “Hey, I was kidding!”

Drift offlines.

.

.

.

And then Drift comes back around.

It’s a bit of an unexpected result.

He gets a brief glimpse of another mech leaning over him before the guy starts to choke him. “You aren’t supposed to be awake,” says tall, purple, and strangle-y. Drift belatedly realizes his throat feels raw and painful under the stranger’s squeezing hands.

The guy pops his vocalizer back into place and releases him, unscathed other than his open throat. Drift instinctively tries to reboot it.

“Don’t talk yet.” He lifts a torch—a regular welding torch, not a medical tool—to Drift’s open throat. Drift winces, but figures it best to hold still while Spinister seals him up. It stings, but it occurs to him to be glad he’s at least _feeling_ again.

Since he can’t address Spinister, he holds still and let his optics flick around to take in the surroundings. The room he’s in appears to be part of the inside of a ship. The walls are dark, matching the typical decorating preferences of Decepticon engineers. It looks as if the room has been modified to be some kind of makeshift medical facility, for there are a variety of tools strewn throughout the room that look like they’ve been gathered at different times, from different sources. Scavenged, as it now occurs to Drift. Of course, that had been what they were doing. They weren’t stranded at all, and he had definitely wasted a trip down to the planet and apparently gotten off worse for it. He could kick himself for being so naive.

The white of his heavily scuffed plating sticks out in the cool tones of the room, against the bench and the deep navy helm of the mech sealing his throat up. From what he can see of his legs that isn’t obscured by this Spinister’s frame, there’s not a lot of important residual damage, and the auto-repair has been busy and still isn’t done. He’s got a few more scrapes and scuffs dinging up his armor than he’d had before being blown up (naturally), but it doesn’t look like anything other than surface damage. He runs through some internal checks, trying to figure out why he’d been on the brink of death, and his lips part in surprise when the logs reveal it.

He’d gotten a good chunk of shrapnel embedded in his spark. He can understand why his whole body felt like it was melting and being stabbed and shot all at the same time, but he can’t understand why he’s still alive at all. Everything he knows about spark surgery indicates that extracting foreign bodies from a spark is an extremely delicate operation that even the most skilled medics are hesitant to attempt. Ratchet has said—

Drift’s freshly repaired spark gives a painful twinge at the thought of the medic, and he shelves what he’d been about to consider, focusing instead on the other mech in the room.

Spinister clicks off the torch and leans back, surveying Drift and giving a curt nod. “Okay, you can talk now.”

Drift tentatively reboots his vocalizer, and tries to speak. “Thank you,” he says softly. He looks down to his chest plate, which has been cleaned and patched up pretty nicely, given the crude tools this mech apparently has to work with. “Spinister, did you do all this yourself? That’s amazing.”

Spinister swiftly grabs a gun that had been lying on the bench next to the other tools and aims it at Drift. “How do you know my name.”

Drift raises his hands into the air. “I heard the others call you that. When you guys were trying to figure out what to do with me?”

“Oh.” Spinister lowers the gun slightly, but not completely. He gives the impression that he’s forgotten he’s holding it. “Well, you can go away now.”

Drift pauses, lowering his hands and looking around. He doesn’t strictly know where he is, and he isn’t sure what is meant by ‘go.’ It seems strange to him that he should be blown up, saved, and then consequently turned loose without more than a minute of conversation between himself and the instigators. But he supposes he shouldn’t be too picky.

He slides off the berth and makes his way towards the only door in the room, pausing and turning when he reaches it. “Uh, was there also shrapnel in my vocalizer?” he asks. He’s been scanning his logs and hasn’t picked up anything about his vocalizer being damaged. He’d only recorded near-spark failure, and the shutdown of major systems as a result, along with some minor joint and moderate hydraulics damage, which have also been repaired. ‘Only.’

“No. It wasn’t working.”

Drift is puzzled. “Why not?”

Spinister shrugs. “Misuse.”

.

.

.

It’s a strange feeling to be turned loose on an unfamiliar ship by an unfamiliar person without any expectation of where he’s meant to go. It leaves Drift feeling unsure of what his next move should be. He wants to check out the damage done to his shuttle to see how bad it is, but he predicts this may be complicated by the fact that his rescuers had intentionally damaged it, and him. He doesn’t know what their plans for it are now that they’ve decided he’s… Well, for the time being they’ve decided not kill him.

On the one hand, he’s glad he wasn’t left to die with shrapnel stuck in his spark. But on the other, the situation could have easily been avoided, and was apparently only remedied due to some kind of half-imagined familiarity. It occurs to him that Misfire might not be as receptive to him once he reveals that he’s no longer a Decepticon, and also not a mole.

As much as he’s trying to look on the bright side—that he’s alive—this whole situation is extremely disheartening. Drift is aware that some people don’t want help, and this wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten the raw end of an unanticipated deal while trying to do good for others, but this setback feels unfair to him. He’s not particularly optimistic in his projections of how bargaining with a group of scavengers is going to go for him, given that they seemed plenty happy to blow him up, leave him to die, and take his things when they thought he was Deadlock. At least Deadlock had been a Decepticon. A Decepticon turned unaligned turned Autobot turned unaligned, again, might not garner very much sympathy in their eyes. He may have to figure something out that doesn’t rely on a little bit of their assistance.

Drift almost doesn’t notice the other mech walking down the hallway until he scrambles out of the way, flattening himself against the wall of it. Drift stops walking. “Uh, hi.”

The guy looks like he wants to say something, even _tries_ to say something, given the way his face twitches, but then it sticks in a sort of unhappy grimace and he remains mute. He scoots down the wall a little bit. Drift notices there’s a considerable chunk missing from his helm to make a rather gruesome wound, and he begins to wonder if this is the sixth lifesign his ship had picked up. Someone else these Decepticons might have blown up for his supplies, then haphazardly repaired—out of pity, or something. Their motivations are unclear to him.

“Are you alright?” he tries, trying to soften his aura and present as unthreatening to this stranger. He moves forward slightly, keeping his hands open and visible, prepared to stop if the stranger doesn’t take kindly to his approach.

“Stay back!” he shouts, launching himself off the wall and stepping backwards. It looks like it takes a considerable amount of effort to wrench his face free from the grimace it had stuck in, though not much has changed other than he’s opened his mouth.

Drift throws his hands up nonetheless, and stops in his tracks. “Whoa, don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“A likely story, _Deadlock_ ,” the guy spits. Ah. Now that he’s said more than two words, Drift recognizes his voice after all. This is...Crankshaft, or something. The forum guy. Drift hadn’t gotten a visual on him while he’d been dying on the ground, as Crankshaft had seemed reluctant to approach. Not that Drift can totally blame him. There have been times in his life where he’s been extremely wary of strangers, and at those points, his solution was sometimes to kill them before they could do anything sketchy.

“Oh, right. Listen, I’m not Deadlock. Uh, anymore.” Spinister was right. His vocalizer is off. It feels a bit staticy still, so he gives it another quick reboot and extends his hand. “My name is Drift.”

Crankshaft doesn't make any kind of move to take Drift's hand, but Drift could swear he can practically hear gears grinding in his head as he tries to think through it. He can clearly see Drift, who no longer so much as holds his posture in the same way as Deadlock, but has put rather a lot of effort into making his appearance nonthreatening. Except for his swords, although those have seem to have been removed, or possibly lost in the explosion. Either way, he's not feeling very excited about the idea of engaging in combat with anyone right now. Not that that's his immediate goal, but he's not ruling it out as a possibility.

"Don’t like you much as an Autobot either," the other mech finally says.

Drift resists the urge to sigh. “Funnily enough, they had the same thought.”

“I don’t see why that’s supposed to make me think you’re not here to murder me.”

Crankshaft has a fair point. “Look, I'm not even armed." Drift gestures to his bare frame, sort of hoping Crankshaft takes it as a joke, since he certainly must know where Drift’s weapons are.

Crankshaft continues to stare at him, unmoving. "What do you want?"

The question strikes Drift as strange. He feels that if he's going to be asked questions like that, maybe someone should be supervising him, rather than allowing him to wander about their ship, doing whatever he pleases. It threatens to irritate him, until he forces himself to remember that anger won’t solve his problem, and this person technically hasn’t done… Well, he doesn’t know who rigged his shuttle to explode without a care as to whether or not he died, so it could have easily been this guy. He should probably be considered at least a little bit culpable. But if he gets mad, he’s less likely to get anything useful out of him.

"Uh, I'd like to figure out how to get off the ship, I think. Unless...I'm a prisoner?"

The notion is absurd to him even as he says it, and apparently also to Crankshaft, who immediately barks out a tense laugh. It must not be something he does very often, because it sounds more like a cough. Maybe it had been a cough. "Of course you're not a prisoner. Who do you think we—" He reboots his own vocalizer now. "Down this way, take a left, a right, and another left." He jerks his thumb over his shoulder and straightens out a bit, leaving Drift wondering what he was going to say.

"Well...thanks, then," he says to Crankshaft, waving awkwardly and giving him a wide berth as he passes. The guy does still seem a little jumpy, and twitches when he's within touching distance of him, but doesn't say anything to him otherwise. Drift can feel him watching him until he disappears down the hallway and resists acting on the urge to turn around, figuring Crankshaft has a right to be jumpy about strangers on his own ship.

A left, a right, and another left later, he's at the docking bay. They're still on the planet's surface. And as he emerges, he can see the smoking ruins of his shuttle in the distance, and his spark gives a sad little contraction. He doesn't quite have it in him to transform and drive over, so he walks instead, dreading what he'll find when he comes upon the last remains of his most recent home.

Maybe this is a sign that he's meant to retool completely, erase the Lost Light and everything, _everyone_ he left behind, by burning the shuttle they'd foisted upon him and buying something new. To remake his life and his person. Again.

He'd considered it before, but it was a little too painful to really dwell on at the time. Now he wonders if it'd even be worth it to get a new ship, or if maybe he should give up spacefaring completely and settle somewhere. Maybe start a Spectralist church and see if he could spread any kind of happiness to anyone else in the galaxy. Try out the theology that violence isn’t always the answer, even in the interest of liberation.

It's an empty sort of fantasy. He knows his disposition won't allow him to settle anywhere, and that it's been this way his whole life. Drift, the restless wanderer. It’s in his name. He's got enough engineering experience to fix up a standard shuttle, so that’s what he’s bound to do. It might take a while, but he could potentially even do it with the scraps of what's left on this planet from the war, taking a leaf out of the scavengers' book. At least to hold him over until he can reach a place with genuine supplies.

First, though, he's going to have a talk with them about manners, as a matter of principle. That’ll be the good he _inflicts_ on them, whether they want it or not, given the situation they’ve put him in.

Luckily, some of them are still milling about the ruins. The 'some' consists of Misfire, the K-Class, and the anxious clicker. Krok had been his name. He's pretty sure someone had said K-Class' name too, but he had missed it, as he'd been so busy dying.

Drift is a bit past the point of wondering if it's safe to approach them head-on, and so does just that, feeling anger again threaten to bubble up in him even as he gets closer, noting that the front of his shuttle is essentially gone, including the engine and the navigation systems, and basically everything that’s most important to spaceflight.

"Oy, Deadlock!" Misfire shouts, spitting out one of the energon sticks Rung had snuck into the shuttle (Primus bless him), having helped himself to Drift's supply. He’s sitting on top of the smoldering shuttle, letting his feet hang in the empty space that was once the window. Shards of thick space-resistant glass drop down like a smattering of rain as he kicks his feet.

The address throws Drift slightly. He feels another pang of guilt in his spark and pushes through it. "Hi, so, first order of business. My name is Drift, and not Deadlock. Glad to meet you. Hope we can get along. Second, did you guys blow up my shuttle? Third, what the heck?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Misfire draws out a long syllable, half-masticated energon in his open mouth as he looks around slowly to his apparently petrified comrades. “What?”

“Can we go back to one?” K-Class asks, also appearing caught off guard and nervous.

“Yeah, I suppose introductions are in order,” Drift says, beginning to cave enough into his irritation at the entire situation to be passive-aggressive. He places his hands on his chest and intonates clearly. “Drift. Me.” He flips his palms outwards, towards them expectantly.

“You’re welcome, by the way, for saving your life,” Krok grunts.

The petulant response lifts Drift solidly into irritation. “Okay, so no introductions, straight into two. Actually, forget two, because my shuttle sure wasn’t rigged to blow before I stopped off on this planet, and you’re the only other ones here. Let’s jump to three.” He splays his hands again, a bit more forcefully this time.

“Uh, listen, Drift?” K-Class steps forward, still looking nervous. “I’m Fulcrum. That’s Krok, and apparently through some bizarre, unfathomable set of circumstances, you know Misfire.”

“Sup,” Misfire says, kicking his feet again and pulling out a fresh energon stick to munch on.

“I think this has all been a huge misunderstanding,” Fulcrum says. “Obviously once we realized, we, uh. Regretted.” He doesn’t even sound too sure about that.

“Who did you even think I was?” Drift asks, dropping a bit of hostility now that someone has been at least _polite_ to him, but still mourning the loss of his shuttle. He tries to reign his aura in a little.

“We had a run in with the DJD recently. I guess we were a bit...spooked.”

“You had a run-in with the DJD and you _lived?_ ” Drift asks, now feeling a bit of horror of his own, perhaps mixed with a tiny amount of awe. He’s not sure how much he wants to be even temporarily in the company of people on The List, since that just paints the target on his back even bigger. But if they managed to fight Tarn and his henchmen off, that seems pretty significant.

He gives this timid-looking K-Class a once over and concludes there has to be more to this crew than meets the eye.

“Who’s spooked? I’m not spooked,” Krok says, giving whatever’s in his hand a few clicks. “Anyway, the DJD are gone, obviously, or none of us would be here. Least of all you, it would seem, if you’ve become some kind of…” he waves his hand vaguely in Drift’s general direction, “Autobot?”

“I’m no Autobot,” Drift says quickly, his tone short, and a sharp pang of deja vu hitting him as he remembers Wing saying the same thing to him in a similar situation. It doesn’t much surprise him that Decepticons consider an unaligned to be just as hostile as someone from the other side. He did, after all. But the war is over, and none of that matters anymore. Or at least, it shouldn’t, but it surely will for a long time. After a bit of a pause, he shifts his weight to his other pede, thinking fair’s fair. “But yeah, I jumped ship. I’m on The List,” he mutters.

“Doesn’t matter,” Misfire pipes up flippantly, hopping off the wreckage of Drift’s shuttle. The thing creaks, but the thus-far steady stream of smoke emanating from it doesn’t grow or shrink in thickness, and there are no further explosions. Drift had been itching to look through it before he’d gotten close enough pretty much everything relevant was missing. It’s basically just a big metal husk now. “The DJD’s gone. That wasn’t even here, anyway. Hey, Deadlock, why don’t you come hang with us for a while? We can fit this thing on the WAP, and we hop around a ton of different places that have free parts and stuff. Bet you could fix it.”

“ _Misfire—_ ”

“Hang on a minute—”

Drift can’t help smiling at Misfire, even though his companions are blustering over his suggestion. Krok looks especially panicked. “It’s Drift now, by the way, in case you didn’t catch it the first two times,” he reminds him.

Misfire boxes him gently on the arm, which still unfortunately smarts due to the fresh repairs. “Sure, loser, whatever.”

“Come over here,” Krok hisses in the direction of Misfire as he backs away from Drift. Fulcrum, next to him, looks unsurely at the smoldering shuttle.

“Don’t mind me,” Drift says, now feeling a little better. He’s not quite planning on taking Misfire up on the offer that seems to have Krok in particular very agitated, but he wouldn’t mind having them tow him somewhere he can pay to have repairs made. Not that he’s going to tell them that right away. He’d rather watch them squirm a bit first, as just a small amount of payback.

Misfire shrugs and lets Fulcrum pull him off with Krok. They go about a dozen meters away, and Drift stands adjacent to the wreckage of his shuttle, pretending to examine it, but really it’s difficult _not_ to hear them.

“Are you missing a huge chunk of your head?” Krok hisses. “No, you aren’t, that’s Crankcase, and he’s not the one doing something stupid like inviting a rogue along with us. So what’s your excuse? You can’t just invite whoever you like to join up. Besides, I’m in charge, remember? You’re supposed to _ask_ me things.”

 _Crankcase_ , Drift thinks. _Not Crankshaft._ Good thing he hadn’t actually used his name. He can’t imagine that would have gone over particularly well.

“Oh, huh. Deadlock—or Drift, whichever—outranks you, doesn’t he? I guess then, because of the rules, he’d be our new captain.”

“Damn the rules! He’s not even a Decepticon anymore, so he doesn’t have a rank.”

“Krok, we did blow up his shuttle completely unwarranted,” Fulcrum points out. “And he almost died.”

“How do you know it was unwarranted? He was sneaking around, watching us, and we don’t know why.”

“He was probably gonna prank us, is my guess,” Misfire says.

They both ignore Misfire’s suggestion. “I guess we don’t know why, but he doesn’t seem that hostile towards us. Other than for blowing up his shuttle. And nearly killing him.” Fulcrum seems intent on pressing this point until Krok notices.

“Spinister fixed him, he’s fine.” Krok waves one hand, keeping his other hand clicking. Every once in a while he glances into his curled palm.

“We could at least drop him off at the nearest neutral outpost,” Fulcrum suggests, sounding frustrated with Krok’s reluctance.

“We don’t have the fuel to waste on that.”

“Maybe we would if you hadn’t blown up all of Drift’s,” Misfire posits. He looks bored, and Drift can tell there are lots of other things he’d rather be doing. He especially isn’t bothering to keep his voice lowered, which leads Drift to find it extra comical that Krok hasn’t bothered to drag his friends further away. He’s getting all of their conversation quite clearly, though he continues to pretend he’s not because he supposes it’s a little more amusing that way.

“This conversation is beginning to feel circular,” Fulcrum says. “It wouldn’t hurt us to have him tag along for a while. I mean, you guys let me join up.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Krok mutters. “I think we need to be more careful about who we throw our lot in with.”

Misfire slings an arm cordially around Fulcrum’s shoulders. “At least Fulcrum doesn’t drink all your energon, like the mysterious Energon Ghost.”

“Misfire, I know _you_ do that. I _label_ it.”

Drift snorts. Krok turns and looks at him, but Drift has already made his face neutral. He shakes his head at his shuttle as if he hasn’t already assessed the damage.

“What, you think ghosts can read?” Misfire snorts back. “Don’t count on it, pinhead.”

Fulcrum gives Krok a stern look. “I don’t think we’re a high priority on the DJD’s list. They seemed to have bigger things on their minds. He hasn’t given any indication of trying to kill us yet, and now we’ve put him in a pretty bad spot in a pretty remote part of the galaxy. If we don’t help him, he might be stuck here on his own for a while, and that’s completely on us. Are we really the kinds of guys who would do that to someone?”

Krok doesn’t reply for a while, and a soft clicking fills the silence. He glances into his palm, then sighs. “Forget it. We can help him.” He completely avoided the question, Drift notes, and neither of them are calling him on it. “But if anything else bad happens, I’m blaming you.”

“Why me?” Fulcrum protests, voice raising in pitch slightly. “Misfire’s the one who offered.”

“Because you pissed me off, and you ask stupid questions. Now shut up and go tell him if you’re such great pals.”

“And you’re just going to stand here in the background, looking cool?”

“...Yes.”

“Fine. Come on, Misfire.”

Drift struggles to remain impassive as Krok stands in the background with his arms crossed, clearly trying very hard to look very cool and stoic, and not succeeding in Drift’s eyes. Fulcrum and Misfire cross the short distance over to him, clearly used to these kinds of shenanigans to the point of embracing them, because they’re both also smiling. “We’ve decided to sign you on,” Fulcrum says, miming as if this were some kind of job interview and offering to shake Drift’s hand and giving a sideways smile as he glances back at Krok.

“Last I’d heard, that was the plan.” Drift returns the smile as he takes Fulcrum’s palm and squeezes it. He’s sure he and Misfire know Drift heard all of that.

Misfire, on the other hand, grabs his hand for what he thinks will be a handshake, and ends up pulling him in to slap him on a back in a sort of half-hug. He murmurs in Drift’s audial, “I can’t wait for you to help me punk the hell out of these idiots.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm losing steam on the 'edit this 15 times before posting' train so this one only got like, 2 and a half. Sorry if there are any mistakes,,
> 
> There's not really a set structure to this fic but it sort of has some 'arcs' or subplots or whatever, and the next one will be in the next chapter.... Anyway, enjoy :')

Of course, Drift had heard Krok say they couldn’t waste fuel taking him to a neutral outpost, but he doesn’t realize what that means until he gets back on board and they explain what the situation really is to him.

What the situation is, really, is that they’re a good distance away from any place friendly enough to neutral Cybertronians (in the unique position of having previously fought on both sides) for Drift to be dropped off without being either overtaken or arrested. While Drift could have made it to a fueling station, fueled up his little ship, and been on his way without drawing too much hostile attention, that won’t work if he needs to make significant repairs, regardless of the fact that he’s willing to pay for them.

Besides that, it turns out the WAP—the Weak Anthropic Principle, as the Scavengers call their home—is actually incredibly fuel _in_ efficient. The thing is apparently quite old, and has gone through quite a few repairs itself, never having been a luxury spacecraft in the first place. When Crankcase tells him the numbers, he actually laughs, thinking he’s joking. Until Crankcase gets very irritated (and, it seems, personally offended) and insists those are the numbers, and if Drift doesn’t like it, he can get out and walk.

So, without having intended to, Drift realizes he will actually end up taking Misfire up on his initial offer to scrounge about planets with them for spare parts to fix his shuttle. They’ll aim for the outpost, on the way back to Cybertron, and if Drift can’t fix his ship before they reach it, they’ll drop him off there and leave him to his own devices. And that’s the way he wants it. Despite this rather embarrassing setback, Drift is already feeling agitated by the very idea of being off-course from his goal, nonspecific though it is, not to mention a little on edge about his team up with this group of strangers.

Misfire, however, insists on dragging him around the ship and re-introducing him to everyone he’s already met, but _formally_ this time. Crankcase ( _not_ Crankshaft) has a small meltdown when he belatedly realizes why Drift is asking him about the efficiency of the ship, and is apparently stricken by facial paralysis as a result of his injury ( _not_ inflicted by the others), and the stress of letting ‘Deadlock’ join the crew. After several long minutes of Drift tiredly explaining that he’s neither a Decepticon mole nor a threat to their safety, he seems to settle uneasily, though it may be a petulant sort of acceptance rather than genuine understanding.

Spinister’s reaction is much less dramatic, though he still seems confused as to who exactly Drift is, and why they’re helping him. He asks questions that seem logical to Drift (Why are we helping him when we hurt him in the first place?), which Misfire more or less dismisses, discounting Spinister as a total idiot, to Drift, right in front of him. Spinister doesn’t have much of a reaction to this, so while Drift privately thinks he can’t be too stupid if he’s able to perform medical miracles so casually, he keeps his own observations to himself, figuring it’s part of their dynamic and not his place to comment on.

Misfire also provides some scattered commentary on Krok and Fulcrum, who seem to have run off in anticipation of this, in addition to his other ramblings about his comrades, and is now taking him to meet the mysterious sixth member of the crew. As they walk, he tells him about their recent experience with the DJD, with what Drift suspects is a bit of embellishment.

“So, yeah, turns out it was Fulcrum they wanted, but we were already knee deep in kicking their afts, so we just committed,” Misfire says casually. Drift smiles and nods politely as if he believes this. As strange as the situation is, and as reluctant as he is to really get involved with six Decepticons, even if they are in name only, it’s a bit of a bittersweet comfort to hear Misfire passionately talking about his exploits. It reminds him of the last time they were together.

He almost stops walking in the middle of the hallway, finally processing what Misfire had said. “Wait, they wanted Fulcrum? Why?”

“Uhhhhhh I don’t remember. I think he explained, but it wasn’t very interesting, so I stopped paying attention. I was hyped up from punching Tarn so hard in the face his optic blew. You can ask him sometime, if you want to be, like, really bored. Fulcrum, not Tarn.”

Drift’s smile broadens. Misfire is definitely different than he’d remembered, but in a good way. A little more relaxed, maybe, now that he’s in with this sort of ragtag bunch, rather than the high stress environment of their last team up at the Decepticon training camps. Not that Deadlock had entirely escaped punishment during his entire time there, or under the command of Turmoil, but he felt that Misfire might have earned a disproportionate number of punishments in the time they’d been together, and many of those were Deadlock’s fault for shirking responsibility, and being able to pull rank as one of Megatron’s chosen soldiers.

He wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but he had been using Misfire for a variety of purposes. True, Misfire had been the one to approach him, seemingly oblivious of the pre-established hierarchy amongst the other Decepticons at the camp. Deadlock’s involvement with Megatron had given him more status than he wanted, although even then it was of a precarious sort, prone to back-stabbing and other betrayals. Of course, everyone who mattered was out for himself. The politics of it mattered very little to Deadlock, but he played along anyway without really giving anyone his trust, at least until Misfire showed up and convinced him there were ways to pass the time that could actually be _fun._

And their pranks had served political means as well, as most of their targets were often the higher ranking members of the campus that Deadlock was meant to associate with. The best part for Deadlock was that they could never prove he did it, and he was quick to pass off the blame onto Misfire whenever they got caught. Misfire’s reputation as a rambunctious hooligan made him an easy target for the authorities, and Deadlock usually walked away from smoking crime scenes with very little to fear other than the growing hostilities of the other snooty Decepticons towards him. And that wasn’t very high on his radar either.

But it’s the way he treated Misfire, who, even if he knew what Deadlock was doing, never gave any indication of it and always acted more like a friend to Deadlock than Deadlock did to him, which causes him to cringe as he’s momentarily overtaken by a familiar feeling of regret from his past. He settles in it for a moment, then pulls himself back to the present, forcing himself to key into what Misfire is saying.

“—and he stomped the hell out of Tarn like six times, _WHAM!_ ” Misfire indicates by stomping as he walks, and Drift swears he hears the ship growl in protest. “And when Tarn got up he was all crunched up, and staggering, and meanwhile Vos is groping around looking for his face, and—”

“Misfire?”

“—their crazy sparkeater is chewing on Kaon’s head—Huh? What? I was really getting into it.”

“I know. It’s a good story. I just had to ask something. Do you remember when we used to hang around at the camps a few million years ago?”

“Course I do. Hey, remember when Starscream came to visit and he was supposed to give some kind of stupid speech to inspire us, and then we snuck into his suite and hooked up the shower to spit out that fluorescent yellow paint?” Misfire snickers. “Him _screeching_ was the single most painful auditory experience of my life, but it was so worth it for the single most _amusing_ visual experience of my life. He looked like some kind of…diseased organic.”

Drift chuckles nervously, remembering Misfire had been gone a few months after their ranking officers had puzzled through that one. “Yeah, I remember. He was…really mad. But I guess I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for my part in how that always worked out—for you. For letting you take the blame. That wasn’t fair.” He wonders as he says it if there’s even the slightest chance Misfire hadn’t known it wasn’t just a fluke of poor investigation.

Misfire stops, and so does Drift. Drift is used to making amends for things he’s done in his past, and he’s also used to it not going well for him. But he’s learned to take responsibility for his indiscretions anyway, for the sake of others more than for himself. He watches Misfire carefully for a reaction, but it’s so quick it’s difficult to make out the nuances of what he might be thinking or feeling, if anything, about this information. “Man, who cares?” Misfire scoffs. “That was ages ago. You think I thought we were B.F.F.s? I’m not that stupid. It was still fun to pull all those wicked stunts on that bunch of idiots. Plus, spending a lot of time in the brig gave me cred.”

Drift is a little surprised by this nonchalance, but finds himself thankful for it as well. He really is especially grateful that he ran into Misfire out here, of all the bots it could have been. He’s thankful for the opportunity to apologize, and be forgiven, since he feels like he especially missed out on some of those opportunities in the most recent months, and they’ve been eating at him. This is a small piece of relief, and it colors this experience thus far to him a little differently.

Besides, if he thinks about it, Misfire and his friends don’t seem to fit the bill of the standard Decepticon. They seem like nice enough people, and also not especially capable of or even interested in causing serious amounts of damage. He can’t necessarily blame them for attacking him after so recently having nearly been tortured to an unspeakably painful death by the DJD, and he finds himself happy that they weren’t.

“Thanks,” Drift says. “I just, you know, had to get it out there.”

Misfire snorts again. “Whatever, loser. Anyway, we’re here.” The door slides open, and Misfire calls out cheerfully into the dark room. “Grimsy!”

The response is rather startling.

.

.

.

“So that went… Okay,” Misfire says as they vent heavily, leaning against the walls of a part of the ship very distant from Grimlock’s quarters.

“What metric are you using for that?” Drift gasps, incredulous.

“Like, every other time someone has gone in there. Besides me. I think he tried to eat Krok last time.”

“I can’t believe Grimlock is _here_ . I can’t believe _you_ found him,” Drift says, fans spinning down gradually and he raises a hand to his helm. He hasn’t yet recovered his swords from wherever the WAP crew had stored them while he was still a potential threat to them, so that had been a narrow and somewhat harrowing escape from a rampaging Dinobot that threatened to invalidate his most recent rescue from spark failure. It was lucky, though abnormal, that Grimlock had seemed to mysteriously tired himself out. “So he attacks everyone? What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, firstly, no, not everyone. He likes me. Most of the time. Probably because I’m the best and coolest person in the span of this entire solar system. So I can’t blame him. But other than that, we don’t know. He’s extremely jumpy and opts for violence as the solution for almost everything—which isn’t exactly different from the old Grimlock—but he doesn’t seem to talk as much as he used to. I dunno, it’s kind of hard to tell. Mostly it’s, ‘Me Grimlock,’ and every once in awhile you’ll get a ‘smash!’ tacked on at the end, but that’s only on good days. He gets tired pretty fast, though, so it’s nothing we can’t handle.”

Drift frowns, engine still thrumming, vents still spinning from his encounter with the Dinobot. “Maybe it’d be best if I just...try to keep my distance.”

“That’ll be you and everyone else,” Misfire says. “You’re missing out, though. He’s fun when he’s calm. Or at least, he’s a good listener.” He shrugs, not quite meeting Drift’s optics.

.

.

.

Aboard the Weak Anthropic Principle, Drift grows restless within a day. The ship is large enough that he’s been generously given his own room. He’s tried confining himself to it, and meditating at length to occupy his time. It helps him feel a little better, but he finds himself unable to keep in that state as long as he might, normally.

It’s funny; back on the Lost Light, he never had a shortage of people to talk to, or things to do. Rodimus was always calling him up for his opinion on matters, if they weren’t already addressing them together. He spent a lot of his off-duty time hanging around the med bay, pestering Ratchet, who would pretend he didn’t appreciate the company, but Drift knew better than to believe what he said. He never made any true efforts to get Drift to leave. At any point.

On the shuttle, he could occupy himself with flying, checking that the shuttle was operational, that he had enough supplies. Trying to find suitable locations to travel through, to plot a course through space that served the dual purpose of letting him fulfill his goal and keeping him from stranding himself too far from supplies. But now he doesn’t even have that. Now he’s just a passenger.

Drift emerges from his room. He’s at least gotten his swords back, though he doesn’t have anyone to practice with, and self study has its limits. He feels a little more comfortable roaming about an unfamiliar ship armed, which maybe speaks to some trust issues he might have, but then again, there are times when an extremely powerful Dinobot sometimes rages about this vessel, and the crew’s solution to it is to let him tire himself out. So maybe it’s not so irrational.

Drift begins to walk through the corridors without a purpose, needing to at least blow off some of this agitation in his frame by walking it off. He makes a turn and realizes he’s already lost track of where he is, and pauses. Maybe he can make a point of learning the layout of this bizarre craft. It would give him something to do for a little while, anyway.

He attempts to trace the route from where he is now to one of the few places he knows for sure exists on the ship—the control room. Feeling determined, Drift then decides if he can accomplish his first goal, he’ll make his second to convince Crankcase that he’s definitely not a Decepticon. Or, that’s probably not what he’s worried about. He’ll convince him that he’s not Deadlock. Or… First he’ll find out why Crankcase is uneasy about him, and then he’ll tell him why he shouldn’t be.

But first, he has to find the control room. If he could get to a window… That usually helps, because then you can just follow the path around to the front. Or if you go the wrong way, you turn around and come back.

Now that he’s thinking of it, though, Drift isn’t sure he remembers the WAP having windows lining the outside. It’s not that kind of ship.

Drift rounds a corner a little quicker than his natural pace out of frustrating, and ends up bumping into something hard. The something immediately snaps back, and points a gun at him as he draws his swords, entering fighting stance. The difference is, Drift quickly realizes it’s only Spinister, whereas Spinister—doesn’t? Drift hasn’t quite gotten a solid grasp on what Spinister’s deal is, but the ‘firing on him’ doesn’t quite make Drift think of him as level-headed. Having already gauged the angle the gun would fire at, Drift deflects the blast with his sword and ducks back around the corner in case there are subsequent shots.

“Spinister, don’t shoot! It’s me!” Drift calls.

“Who’s me!” Spinister yells back.

“Drift?” He cautiously sheathes a sword and waves a hand out at him from behind the corner. “I met you yesterday! You saved my life?” He explains, genuinely unsure how much of this information is familiar to the other mech. “After you guys blew up my ship, but I suppose that’s just a minor sticking point,” he mutters, more for his benefit than Spinister’s.

There’s a pause, and no further blasts. “Oh, right. The actor.”

Drift has no idea what to make of this, until he vaguely recalls the conversation from when he’d been on the brink of spark burnout, and he sheathes his other sword as well. He peeks out from the corner with his hands up, but prepared to drop them to his swords again. Spinister’s gun is lowered this time. “Hi. Sorry if I startled you.”

“It happens,” Spinister shrugs. He doesn’t stow his gun, but now that Drift’s thinking about it, he feels like most times he’s seen this guy, he’s been holding it. He wonders if that has anything to do with his presence, or if it’s just his natural way of being. “Well, bye.” He moves as if to pass Drift in the hallway.

“Wait!” Drift says suddenly, stepping in front of him in a way he only belatedly realizes might be dangerously swift. “Do you think you could point me in the direction of the control room?” This excitement has given him a slight drop in motivation. He’s no longer sure harassing Crankcase as he’s trying to pilot the ship will be the best use of his time, but it’s still something to do. However, at the moment, he feels he might be lost.

Spinister turns slowly on the spot, as if he’s seeing this hallway for the first time. “Uhhmmm…” He taps the barrel of his gun against his mask in thought. “That way,” he says, pointing straight in the direction Drift had been heading, “and then that way.” He points right.

“Okay…” Drift peers at the end of the hall. He can see where it turns. “How far, um, that way?” He also indicates the rightward direction.

“‘Bout 45 seconds, maybe.”

Drift gets the sense that this is a line of questioning not worth pursuing further. “Okay, thank you.” He steps out of the way, and Spinister passes. He feels as if he’s just been given directions in an unfamiliar city by a stranger, rather than by a crewmate in the place he is to call home for the next indeterminate amount of time.

 _It’ll take time,_ he tells himself, striding forwards again.

Drift clocks exactly 45 seconds internally as he walks through the ship, and finds himself in the middle of a hallway, which, up ahead, splits off to the left and the right. While he might have been prepared to go further on Spinister’s directions, given he has a larger stride and could cover more ground in less time, they hadn’t included any other detours, leaving Drift to assume he’d omitted something.

He chooses the rightward path again, and ends up in a large common area differing from other parts of the ship he’s seen. He’s struck a little by the quaintness of the area. There’s furniture laid out in front of a scavenged-looking television. Rubber darts stick out from the wall in various places, with associated pop-guns lying on tables next to empty cans of energon. There’s a rather vintage, peeling poster of Megatron in the corner with the words ‘You are being deceived’ plastered across the bottom in a now-retro purple font. Drift gets the feeling it was originally hung more for the decorative effect than sentimentality for the message, given there’s also a rubber dart sticking out of the Decepticon Commander’s forehead. He smiles as he looks around the room. This definitely seems like the preferred spot on the ship during downtime. Which makes it feel a bit strange that no one else is here.

Except, someone is. Krok jumps when he notices Drift standing in the doorway, at almost the same moment Drift notices him coming up from behind the door of the fridge. He nearly drops the can of energon he’d been holding, but fumbles for it and ultimately catches it.

“Nice catch,” Drift says.

“Thanks,” Krok replies awkwardly. There’s a beat, and then he reaches into the fridge, grabbing for another can and holding it up. “Need some fuel?”

It takes until that moment for Drift to realize his tanks were getting a little low. “If you don’t mind.” He holds out a hand, stepping forward.

Krok tosses it to him. “What are you skulking about for?” he asks as he pops the top of his own and sticks a straw into the opening.

“Going a little stir crazy, I guess,” Drift admits. “I was entertaining myself by finding my way around. Or trying to.”

“Huh. Would have thought it’d be a lot more boring on that shuttle of yours.”

They’re still standing a few meters apart. Drift, having nothing to say to Krok’s comment, pops the top on his own energon and looks down at it with a bit of scrutiny. “This is the regular stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not… It’s… You know. Fresh.”

“Yeah it’s fresh, it’s in a can,” Krok responds, sounding a bit irritated. “You can only take so much cannibalized fuel. Sorry to break it to you, though, the fresh stuff only goes so far. You’d better savor it.”

Drift laughs. “That’s not what I meant. I had just assumed it was all...recycled. I know it’s not unheard of.” He takes a cautious sip. It tastes fine. Fresh, as he’d noted.

“Hm,” Krok grunts, giving Drift a scrutinizing look as he sips at the straw. “I really don’t want to know what kind of past you’ve had that you were prepared to go along with a 100% Dead Guy Fuel diet.” It’s clear that he intends it to be a lighthearted comment, but seems to immediately realize that it had landed a little too squarely. “Sorry, that was uncalled for.”

Drift’s smile thins, but the comment doesn’t cut as deep as perhaps Krok had thought it did. “It’s fine,” he says. He doesn’t add, ‘No, you don’t want to know,’ even though he’s thinking it. “We’ve all got things from our past that haunt us,” he says instead. His optics flick over to the poster of Megatron.

Krok’s got whatever it is in his hand that makes the clicking noise, now that he’s not holding two cans of energon, and he clicks it a few times. Drift notices he doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it. “Yeah, that’s for sure.”

Drift lets the silence soak in for just a moment before he takes pity on Krok. “Anyway, could you point me to the control room? I haven’t quite made it there yet. You know, on my mission of figuring out where everything is.”

“Sure,” Krok says, seeming soothed knowing they won’t have to recover from the awkward turn this conversation had taken in the same room. “You were close. Go back out that way, then take the left fork. Your first right is a set of stairs, and it’s up there. The lights go out in the stairwell sometimes, so you gotta pound on the wall a little bit. You’ll see the dents.”

“Thanks,” Drift says. He raises the energon in his hand. “And, thanks.”

“Sure,” Krok replies, clearly waiting for Drift to leave.

.

.

.

Drift finally makes it to the control room. He pounds on the wall in the dark stairwell, and the lights flicker on as Krok had said. He hears Crankcase swear in the room above, and feels bad for startling him, but supposes it’s better than having snuck up on him silently. Sometimes, Drift would do that unintentionally to Ultra Magnus, who would berate him, but be unable to come up with a suitable law or rule to charge him with breaking, and would always eventually decide Drift just had poor manners and was doing it on purpose. Rodimus had always found that really funny.

Even still, when he reaches the top of the stairwell, he knocks his knuckles against the wall.

“What?” Crankcase grunts without turning around. His voice really is especially grumpy, but the tone just now is reminding him of Ratchet.

“Just wandering around,” Drift says softly, looking around the control room again. The screen above him displays an endless expanse of pinpricks of stars on a black background with a couple of HUD overlays whirring over it in fine red lines.

Crankcase does visibly jump this time when he speaks, and he turns around in his chair to look at Drift. Drift guesses he hadn’t been expecting an unfamiliar voice, belonging to an unfamiliar mech. “Oh, you,” he says. “Well, I’m very busy piloting, so don’t expect me to entertain you.”

Drift wanders up to the controls, standing near them as Crankcases hands sit idly on the steering, and the vast expanse of buttons and switches remain untouched. He could swear he can hear Crankcase gritting his denta. “Yeah, you gotta make sure you don’t hit anything,” Drift says a bit smugly, sipping his energon to hide his smile.

Crankcase shoots a sideways glance at him. “Smart aft. You should know, things crop up. Sudden asteroids, and all that.”

“Oh, yes, I know. I really had to watch out for those, in the shuttle. You know, because it was so small. I bet it’s even harder to maneuver a big ship like this out of the way. Although, out here, if you can’t see it, space junk probably can’t do as much damage to a bigger ship like this.”

Crankcase turns to face him now, dropping his hands from the controls and confirming Drift’s suspicion that it had been on autopilot, anyway. “What do you _want?_ ”

“I was just hoping to make you more comfortable by familiarizing you with my presence, since I’ll be here a while,” Drift replies brightly.

“You’re trying to make me like you by _antagonizing me?_ ”

“I promise you, I’ve entirely surrendered all my antagonistic ways,” Drift lies, feeling a little more in character of someone he hasn’t been in a while. “As a practicing spectralist, I—”

“Bah!”

A smile quirks at Drift’s lips. “Did you just…?”

“Yes, I did. Don’t start with all that namby-pamby _Primus stuff_ around me. I’m not going to trust you just because you feel comfortable _annoying me_ while I’m trying to work.”

Drift’s face slowly breaks into a smile. “You remind me of someone.” He doesn’t say ‘someone I used to know,’ because he’s carefully avoiding thinking of it like that, or thinking about it at all.

“Hmpf,” Crankcase grunts. “Some Autobot?”

“Yeah. So? The war’s over.”

“So I’ve heard. Doesn’t mean that kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore. You’d know better than me. It always matters.”

Drift stares out into the vast emptiness of space, letting these words really sink into him. Something he already knows that someone else has said out loud. After a long minute, he replies, “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

.

.

.

In the end, Drift decides that his time between destinations might be most productively spent figuring out exactly what he needs to salvage from his ship, and working on cleaning it up in the meantime. After another bout of wandering, he makes his way to the cargo bay, which is now crowded mostly by the hulking remains of his shuttle. And, also, Fulcrum and Misfire.

“What are you guys doing in here?” he asks a bit warily, a bit ruder than he intends. But he’d sort of been hoping to avoid further strained interactions with his new shipmates for the rest of the day.

“What are _you_ doing in here?” Misfire shoots back at him. He’s actually inside the wreck, whereas Fulcrum is keeping his distance from it against the wall of the cargo bay.

“This is my shuttle,” Drift says.

“Yeah? And it’s on our ship. Checkmate.” He’s not even doing anything, just kind of chilling out in the chair at the edge of the exploded nose. A bit of it remains, though the glass has cracked and the navigation systems, sensors, fuel gauge, and anything else that might need to be checked to maintain space flight is essentially useless. This much he can tell from just looking. Pieces of the hull could probably be salvaged, but that was always the easy part. Engines, even, are not as hard to find as a compatible network chip. Still, there’s internal mechanisms connecting all that to the actual machinery that he needs to get in there to look at.

Drift turns to Fulcrum this time, who’s got his arms crossed. “Don’t look at me, I’m just supervising,” he explains.

“I’m not doing anything!” Misfire says, splaying his hands out openly in defense. “I was just— Look, I was just checking if there were any secret compartments, and I looked for five minutes and got bored, so I stopped.”

“It was closer to two and a half minutes,” Fulcrum says quietly, mostly for Drift’s benefit.

“No, unfortunately those were all in the part you blew up. That was where I kept all my _really good_ snacks,” Drift says. He can’t seem to help being jovial, even though it’s been getting him into spots of awkwardness. The words come out before he can even think about it.

“Dammit,” Misfire says with a half-smile creeping onto his expression.

Drift smiles back (he can’t help it), but says nothing as he moves over to his shuttle. He’s decided it doesn’t matter so much if they’re just going to hang out while he does his work. It might be okay to just hear other people talking, even if it’s not to him.

However, they don’t seem to have lost interest in him. “What are you doing?” Misfire asks, hovering nearby and watching as Drift begins to tug apart the outer frame of the shuttle to get a better look at the wiring. He realizes this might be easier done with tools, and so he might need to wait until they reach the next planet they’re heading towards to pick some up.

“I’m trying to see what needs to be replaced.”

“Do you want us to leave you alone?” Fulcrum asks, also hovering nearby as he watches Drift squint at some frayed, burnt wires.

“You can stay if you want. As you said, it’s your ship.” He tries to tug on a few main fuel lines, which are typically sturdy and won’t rip, but they seem to be stuck on something twisted up deeper inside. He sighs. “Do either of you have a light?”

“Nah,” Misfire says. “I don’t do any engineering work. Spinister might have one. Or Krok. Or Crankcase. Really anyone but us.”

“I have one,” Fulcrum says, despite Misfire’s proclamation. He holds up something smaller and shorter than his finger and clicks it over where Drift’s looking. It provides a very thin, dim stream of light.

Drift smiles, on the verge of laughing. “Is that a keychain?”

“They gave it to us when we joined up, in my division,” Fulcrum admits sheepishly. “I haven’t used it much.” He passes it to Drift.

It is, indeed, a keychain, attached to exactly zero keys. Drift turns it over in his hands. The Decepticon insignia wraps around the exterior of the thin little device, save for a thin rectangle of very old solar panels. A couple million years old, Drift would imagine. He’s surprised Fulcrum hasn’t lost it yet. “Thanks,” he tells Fulcrum. “I can borrow it?”

“I can’t believe you kept that little piece of junk,” Misfire scoffs. “I’m gonna go check Spinister’s lab.” He trods off towards the door, leaving Drift and Fulcrum alone.

“Want me to hold it?” Fulcrum asks, holding out his hand.

“Sure.” Drift drops the semi-useless little device into his palm, figuring it’s better than nothing. He at least appreciates the sentiment of help. He points towards a fat red cable that’s melted at the end into a sort of copper goop. “Just around there would be good. Thanks.”

He starts digging through the wires, intending to find which ones are intact and for which systems, and which will need to be replaced.

“I’m not sure if anyone has really said this to you,” Fulcrum starts after a long beat of silence, “and I think I’d be kind of surprised if they had, but I just wanted to say for _my_ part, I’m sorry about all this mess.”

Drift looks sideways at him for just a moment. “Thanks. I’m kind of surprised to hear it from anyone. Not as surprised as I am to not be dead, though.”

“I don’t think anyone was expecting you to be hurt _that_ badly.”

“You also weren’t expecting me to be Deadlock.” It’s meant more as an observation than a dig of any kind. Of all of them, Drift recognizes Fulcrum and Misfire have been the most friendly towards him, and Fulcrum seems a bit more level-headed than Misfire, whom Drift knows to be very excitable.

“No, we weren’t.” Fulcrum pauses. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

Drift laughs a little. “I feel totally normal. Kind of can’t believe it. Who knew there were people out here like Spinister.” Drift realizes as soon as he says it that he doesn’t even fully know what Spinister is ‘like,’ but he supposes Fulcrum understands his meaning.

“Yeah,” Fulcrum replies. “It’s kind of amazing. I didn’t expect it either, but he also disabled my explosive charge.”

“Wow,” Drift says, genuinely impressed. He takes a careful look at Fulcrum, debating whether or not he wants to ask. He’s decided during the span of this conversation that he likes Fulcrum, and doesn’t want to offend him, but they seem to be having a moment. “So, K-Class— Not your idea?”

“Nope,” Fulcrum says. “I was supposed to be on Traitor’s Wheel, but then… You probably know, actually.”

“That was kind of what I figured,” Drift replies. “We were really losing sight of things by that point. I hadn’t noticed how far off track from what we—or at least, what _I_ had wanted. I defected not too long after that.”

Fulcrum sounds as if he’d been waiting for the conversation to come to this point. “Can I ask…?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Drift says quietly. “I guess I’m not used to people not knowing. You guys must have been out on the fringes for a while. Or it’s entirely possible I’m not as big of a news story as I thought.” He smiles.

“To your credit, I’d been inactive for… I don’t even know how long. And not a lot of, you know, _new_ news gets watched here. Can’t really blame them for falling out the habit. It was never really anything good.”

“Right,” Drift says. “Anyway, to answer your question… I just kind of got lucky enough to self-destruct in a very forgiving place. Right place, right time sort of thing.” He pauses, caught up in the thick fog of the past. “It was, honestly, a miracle.”

Fulcrum doesn’t reply right away, and Drift realizes he’d forgotten who he was talking to.

“No offense,” he adds, hoping to have gotten it in before the mood turned awkward.

Fulcrum shrugs. “The war’s over. Besides, I don’t really think anyone here would disagree with you on that point anyway. Things did get out of hand. At least, that’s what I believe.”

Drift nods and lets the conversation drop naturally as he focuses on the shuttle damage.

He sorts through it for a few minutes, guiding Fulcrum’s light near wordlessly over to new areas to examine, when finally he asks, “So, how bad is it?”

Drift doesn’t realize for a second that he’s talking about the shuttle, but when he does he answers honestly. “I guess it’s not as bad as it looks.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this is late even though I never said I would definitely update regularly, haha. I did a lot of work reworking this chapter and the next one, which were originally one chapter. But I thought it would be more *exciting* this way. 
> 
> **EDIT:** Crap, sorry if you got three emails about this, I was having a really hard time getting it to post and it wasn't showing that it had so I accidentally uploaded the same chapter.... 3 times. I had a dream about this but I was like "No, I checked, surely that extremely embarrassing dream won't come true."  
>  RIP me.

They set down in a patch of dry, cracked earth, devoid of bodies and what little else there is that remains here. Drift finds it disheartening that this planet has taken up a visage so closely resembling Varas Extinsecus—another long-dead planet—that the only difference is the wind. And to him, it’s a last protest of a dying world to try to wash away the blood on the wound.

Sarkas is in the next system over from Kol, lit by a star called Rolia. The records online point Sarkas out as having once been thriving with life. What had made it interesting to the Decepticons, however, was that it was also rich with a complex oil that could be used to synthesize energon. As they were on the brink of mining the planet dry, it made its way onto the top of the Autobots’ ‘To Do’ list, and they’d decided to liberate the planet of the Decepticon menace. They’d succeeded in doing so, but it had turned out the planet was beyond help anyway, and the Autobots had moved on to attend to other matters.

Sarkas had once been a green planet, home to several primitive organic species. This was a rarity so close to the Vestial Imperium (though it lay technically outside the designated borders), but pollution from the mining had leached it dry of life, leaving it a dead, red rock. And sometime in the last million or so years, it had gained a reputation of sorts as being haunted. This hadn’t deterred any mechs that didn’t already bend to the whims of superstition, but the few who’d dared to visit had since been reported as missing. There seemed to be a quiet reluctance amongst those who had known them to seek them out at their last known whereabouts.

Drift peers out the window of the ship he’s raiding for parts. He’s been to Sarkas once before, ages and ages ago, back when he was still one of Megatron’s favorite pets. Perhaps ‘pet’ isn’t an accurate enough way to describe their relationship; Megatron might have held genuine affection for him, in whatever way was possible for him. But Drift isn’t feeling especially sentimental as he sees what their war has done to this planet. He doesn’t have it in him to mourn, either, but there’s a subtle disappointment in him as he recalls seeing it alive so long ago, and now reduced to a horrible, windy carcass of a world.

Sarkas’ cruel gusts are doing their best to wear down the husks of Cybertronian metal until there’s no reminder of the war left marring its surface. Unfortunately, it’ll be another couple million years until its successful, and meanwhile, the chemicals seeping into the planet from slow-corroding metal are only making the sick planet sicker. The place is so unwell it leaves his whole field tingling unpleasantly just from being close to it.

As far as Drift is concerned, they’re doing it a favor by removing as much from it as they can.

“Do you need battery cells?”

“Mm?” Drift breaks his attention away from a moment after Crankcase speaks, realizing this had been directed at him.

“Quit spacing out,” Crankcase complains. “I’m not going to fix your damned shuttle for you. I don’t see why it’s not you under here instead of me.” He’s half under the open panel of this little ship’s navigation system, crouching in what looks like a very uncomfortable position so he can glare up at Drift. Within a few more seconds, he gives up on it and creeps out from under it, metal creaking as he stretches back up into standing position. He reaches a hand behind to knuckle into his backstruts and glares when he notices Drift watching him. “What?”

“Uh, nothing. Sorry, I got distracted. This place used to be so different.”

Crankcase doesn’t even reply. He turns as Drift peers into the space he’s evacuated. “Spinister, did you get that light fixture free yet?”

“No,” Drift hears Spinister say as he crawls into the space to check out the batteries. Then, a moment later, the jangling of metal and scraping of wires, and, “Yes.”

“Good. Now maybe Misfire will stop complaining about how dark it is in the Sector 3 hallway closet. Don’t even know why he cares that the _closet_ is dark…”

Drift is fairly certain Misfire hides there when they play Shoot Shoot Bang Bang, but he also doesn’t think Misfire would like him spreading that around, so he focuses on his task instead. Almost immediately he notices these batteries won’t be compatible with his ship without a voltage converter, and he doesn’t really feel like adding another thing to his list of stuff to find. He sighs, slightly disappointed, and backs out of the little crawlspace.

“Well?” Crankcase asks expectantly, and with a little less patience than Drift thinks he deserves, but he disregards that concern for now. He takes it as a win, at least, that Crankcase no longer flinches when they pass each other in the hall. Drift can’t tell if he’s being especially hostile to him or if he’s just like this, but Fulcrum seems to think he’s just being moody and he’ll get over it soon, so Drift pretends he doesn’t notice.

“I’d need a converter to get them to work, so it’s probably not worth it to lug them back to the ship,” Drift admits.

Crankcase looks at Spinister, who for once seems to know something Drift doesn’t and snorts. “Noob,” Spinister says.

“You want batteries, you better take those,” Crankcase grunts, seeming to think having to explain this is beneath him. “Or it’ll be another year before you find ones that _suit your tastes._ When you scavenge, you take what you can get, and you make compromises. Your ship isn’t gonna be nice and sparkly Autobot-clean when you’re done patching it up with other ships’ parts.”

“ _We’re heading out,_ ” Krok chimes in on the comm before Drift can reply, “ _and I don’t want to talk about it._ ”

“ _Sorry, Krok,_ ” Misfire sings back into the comm, although he’s certainly right there with him.

Drift has no idea what this means, but Crankcase has a tight expression on his face. Spinister is no longer paying attention.

When they’d landed, they’d intended to all head out at the same time. Crankcase typically goes off to look for parts for whatever the WAP needed, or might need, and Spinister often accompanies him to undo some of the trickier wiring and fastenings, unless there’s a greater need elsewhere. They figured it made sense to have Drift come with them since he’d be doing the same thing, and they’d all need to help carrying whatever they found. It’s not exactly an ideal team up for any of them, but Drift does, on a level, appreciate that they hadn’t just blown up his ship (with him in it) and sent him off to start repairing it on his own.

But they hadn’t been able to find Fulcrum or Misfire to help Krok scrounge around for fuel. Rather than delay all of them, Krok had sent them out while he looked for the other two. And now apparently he’s found them, but there seems to be more to it than that.

“What’s that about?” Drift wonders cautiously.

“Don’t ask,” Crankcase says before Spinister can get a chance to answer.

Drift stares at them for a moment, and decides he’s not going to make any headway on that front. But at least this time Crankcase looks more tired than cranky. Drift jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m gonna get those batteries out, then.”

“You do that,” Crankcase says.

.

.

.

The dust is the thickest around the source of the battle, which makes scavenging that much harder. On their way to the engine room, Drift, Spinister, and Crankcase have to wade through piles of coarse sand that’s been blown in from the outside, through a hole from a blast that probably took the ship down.

The worst part of this planet is only apparent when you’re exposed to the outside. It’s the constant, eerie sort of howling music as the wind whistles through and over and around thousands of little metal fixtures. This is the sound of senseless death—a discordant, tuneless, spine-chilling wail.

“ _I don’t like this place,_ ” Fulcrum says after a while over the comm channel, voicing Drift’s unspoken feelings. He shakes out a pede to loose the sand from his joints and treads down the unsheltered hall of this transport ship, the voice of the wind trailing in behind him as his companions’ chatter fills his audials.

“ _Tough._ ” Krok’s voice comes back through the comm. “ _We’re low on fuel. We need to get enough to make it to the next rock, so if you’re that skeeved out by a bit of dust, use it as motivation to get your work done faster._ ”

Fulcrum continues. “ _It’s not the dust—_ ”

 _“—Is it the big monster?”_ Misfire wants to know.

Fulcrum is momentarily derailed from his train of thought. “ _What monster?_ ”

“ _I think he’s talking about the rumors,_ ” Drift supplies helpfully.

Fulcrum makes a noise of unsure assent that nearly gets lost in the sound of the wind. “ _I dunno about that. It’s just overall creepy. I feel like this planet doesn’t want us here._ ”

“ _Tough for the planet, too, then! Now shut up and keep your mouth closed if you don’t want dirt gunking up your systems, face-vent._ ”

“ _Wow, Krok,_ ” Misfire chimes in. “ _‘Face-vent.’ Good one. I’ll have to remember that._ ”

“ _Same goes for you, idiot._ ” He continues, a little more quietly, but still through the comm, “ _I don’t know why I’m even bothering._ ” He speaks up again. “ _I hope you choke on a dirt clod. Krok out._ ”

“ _Lol,_ ” Misfire says. As in, he actually says the word ‘lol’ through the comm. Drift smiles, glad at least some of them are relatively free from the unease that’s gripping him and Fulcrum.

The comm goes quiet, because as much as Misfire seems to love to riff on Krok, he’s probably still being cognizent of the dust. Even if you close off all your vents, there’s still a worry that some dust can get through, and it doesn’t seem like any of them can afford to purge spoiled fuel. Drift guesses they’ve taken the same precautions he and Crankcase had by working up a makeshift mask before leaving the WAP, but there’s still a faint ghost of a stir in his fuel tank that he attributes to the strength of the wind sneaking past those tight tolerances.

“Help us get the door open?” Spinister calls, and Drift picks up speed to meet up with them.

There are masses of red dirt piled up along the crevices and corners of the engine room, and a good thickness of it coating the floor. It looks like some kind of tomb, rather than something meant to fly through the sterile vacuum of space. The engines in here look charred, as if there’d been some kind of explosion, but the sand beating against the metal over time has brushed away most of the dirt.

“Doesn’t look promising,” Drift says.

Crankcase grunts as if to say, ‘You never know,’ and Drift regrets voicing his concerns.

He’d thought he would fit in fine with the rest of them, at least occupationally, given the kinds of things he’d had to go through during his early life on Cybertron. But it’s quickly becoming clear that not all hardships grant the same kind of experience. Surviving off cannibalized fuel is pretty much all he’s familiar with that these mechs do, and the rest of their practices are relatively unknown to him. It’s far different scrounging around desolate battlefields than it is a city.  

Drift follows Spinister inside and gently lets the door close on them to keep out the awful noise, at least so they can talk to each other more easily. He can still hear it battering dust against the outer walls of the ship, and the muffled tune of that strange howling music coming off the corpses, but it’s not so loud now. The door won’t close properly, so they don’t have any chance of getting trapped inside.

The comm crackles on, nearly making Drift jump as he hears it clearly without the cacophony from outside. “ _Anyone noticing that a lot of these guys seem to have died in pretty gruesome ways?_ ” It’s Fulcrum again.

“ _Wreckers,"_  Krok grunts back, an explanation in one word.

“ _I didn’t think the Wreckers were this keen on gore. I mean, I’m standing in front of a guy who's had all his internal systems ripped out through his mouth and mounted on pikes in a circle around him. Who even has time to do that?_ ”

“ _I thought I told you to keep your vent shut and do your work,_ ” Krok snaps.

Fulcrum doesn’t reply. Drift keeps moving through the ship, mulling over Fulcrum’s words, thinking of Megatron again.

 

_“You’ve really got to keep Tarn on a shorter leash,” Deadlock snorts, surveying the scene of carnage before them, feeling more boredom and ire than pity._

_Three mechs—Decepticon soldiers—or what’s left of them, are propped up in a sort of pyramidal shape against each other. They look like they could just be in stasis or something else equally harmless, for the glimmer in their unmarked plating, save for the massive amounts of now-dried energon that has poured out of their mouths. Two of their faces have been torn open to accommodate for someone’s arm plunging into their intake to rip out fuel systems, t-cogs, intake control, and whatever else is generally meant to stay_ inside _a mech. The other one has had his mask ripped off and an entrypoint made where there was none. Whoever it was had exploited all angles within reach, going up for the brain, judging from the copious energon leaked from the optics. These trophies are now posted on gorey pink-stained pikes in a circle around the bodies, and the circle has been tied together and completed in the dirt with more energon._

_“This wasn’t the DJD,” Megatron says with complete surety. “Tarn doesn’t waste time on art projects.”_

_Deadlock waits for him to explain, but he doesn’t, instead turning and motioning for him to follow. So he does, keeping in step with the larger mech’s strides and trying to bite down his curiosity. He’s silent for a while before speaking._

_“Are you religious, Deadlock?”_

_“I don’t know what you mean, My Lord.”_

_“You do know, you just don’t see why it’s relevant, and so you chose to deflect rather than answer.” Megatron’s optics slide over to him, and he doesn’t even have the gall to look smug about it. He’s still trying to teach Deadlock_ discipline.

 _Smartass._ _“Okay,” Deadlock concedes, resisting the urge to scoff. “No, I’m not. I don’t see how any Decepticon could be. We’re fighting against the Functionists, after all.”_

_“There’s more to religion than merely Adaptus,” Megatron explains. “This was done by followers of Mortilus.”_

 

What had ensued had been a minor headache for Megatron for a few years following. As had happened a couple of times before and would happen numerous times after, factions were cropping up within the Decepticons vying to make their voices heard.

Deadlock had known Megatron to be wary of any religious mechs, though he’d allow it, up to a point. The Mortilus worshippers crossed that point when they started equating the Decepticon cause with cleansing under the god’s name, willfully misinterpreting Megatron’s goals and actions, to make their own displays. Or at least, that was what the warlord insisted. Drift has drawn his own conclusions since, from his own theological studies of Mortilus across Cybertronian culture and even a few others that seemed to have adopted him into their pantheons.

But the fact was, for a while, they made a mess. Whatever reason Megatron wanted to give for making an example of them—he didn’t want this to become a religious crusade, or maybe just not wanting Decepticon corpses to be desecrated in the name of some zealot’s ideations—didn’t matter much, because in the end that was what happened.

Fulcrum’s description reminds Drift more of that than of the Wreckers. He debates whether bringing it up with them is worth the potential of being shut down again when static fizzles through the comm again.

“ _Ummmmmm_ ,” Misfire says, “ _I think these guys might have some kinda… Traps? In ‘em?_ _Anyway, there’s something stuck on my chest now and I can’t get it off._ ”

“ _Are you hurt?_ ” Fulcrum asks, sounding a bit panicky. Drift feels his own anxiety climbing with this news.

“ _I_ _t doesn’t seem to be doing anything, but I don’t really want to see if it changes its mind if I let it hang out._ ”

Krok makes a point to sigh into the comm. “ _Spinister, go help Misfire. Or if he dies before you get there, do a teardown, and don’t sample the goods._ ”

“ _hanks buddy,_ ” Misfire shoots back drily.

“Gotcha,” Spinister says. There’s an echo, as he’s standing only a few feet away from Drift, something which seems to confound the larger mech for a moment as he looks around the room with guarded suspicion.

“ _And—”_ There’s a sort of strangled yelp and a clunk through the comm and Krok chimes in as well, sounding appropriately embarrassed. “ _On second thought, maybe we should meet up. I think all these bodies are trapped. Came out of nowhere…_ ”

.

.

.

The four of them stand at a distance as Spinister slowly pries loose little pieces of the device on Misfire’s chest. It can’t be easy, given the wind howling wildly around them, but it seems at least that Spinister’s bulk blocks some of it as he leans over Misfire, working.

The device is small and round with sharp little legs anchored against the plating. It looks like a bomb, honestly, but it hasn’t detonated, or given any kind of indication that it might do so. And Misfire claims to feel fine, if not a little uneasy. No one has enough medical experience to prove that the walking, talking Misfire is any worse off than he usually is.

Something _is_ off about this planet, Drift decides. Whatever had happened millenia ago with Megatron hadn’t extended as far as traps; or at least, not in this way. While it’s not unheard of for surviving Decepticons to plant little explosive _gifts_ in the bodies of fallen comrades for Autobots to find, this doesn’t make sense. There’s too many dead here, and it’s too far off the beaten path, and the thing on Misfire hadn’t even exploded. Something is just…wrong.

Krok, too, now seems to share the discomfort spreading throughout the group, but the point he keeps pressing is still valid. They’re out of fuel. They can’t get off this planet until they get some more, and there’s only one way they’re gonna get it—scavenging. So they’ll have to make do.

Spinister finally manages to pop the device off. Misfire immediately rubs at the plating as the rest of them peer at the thing in Spinister’s hand. He easily pries off the top, revealing an empty container. “I don’t get it,” he says over the howl of the wind. “There’s nothing in here.”

Krok seems to relax a little. “It’s probably just meant to scare us off, then.”

“Yeah, except all these dead dudes are dry anyway,” Misfire complains, still keeping his hand over his spark. “What a rip-off.”

Fulcrum takes the thing from Spinister as he goes to work on the device mounted over Krok’s spark. “There’s nothing explosive… It’s just an empty metal husk with a locking mechanism.”

Somehow, the fact that the device is empty stirs more cause for worry in Drift than relief. They still don’t have all the clues needed to piece together this mystery, and Drift is worried about what will happen if they figure it out too late. He feels like there’s something else about the nature of this creepy planet that he should understand, but he can’t get a good mental grip on it.

He peers over Fulcrum’s shoulder at the device, but it doesn’t spark any inspiration. “Misfire, you’re sure you don’t feel anything?” he asks.

“Yeah, I dunno, I’m fine.” He shakes his head as Spinister pops the second device off of Krok. This one is empty as well.

“Do you think they’re in all of these?” Fulcrum asks, looking across the slew of carnage around them.

And he had been right. Now that Drift is paying closer attention to them, they are sort of nastily arranged, with the least disturbing images just being the ones that have had their limbs removed and mounted on pikes around them, leaving just the torso intact. Seems to him that whoever had done this wasted a lot of time that could have been channeled into any number of more productive activities, but then again, that’s not how he chooses to show his devotion.

There’s a clanking sound amidst the rustle of the wind again, and Crankcase says guiltily, “Yeah, that’d be my guess.”

Almost immediately, there’s another clanking noise, followed by a gunshot, and Spinister is now wearing one of the devices as well.

“For Pit’s sake!” Krok yells, shoving the larger mech in his ire. “Stop touching them!”

“I thought I could shoot it,” Spinister says.

“How would that have helped, you idiot?!”

There’s a pause while Spinister presumably thinks about this. “I dunno, I just wanted to do it.” He picks the tiny bot off himself before attending to Crankcase.

Drift crouches down over the bot that has just launched its sticky projectile at Spinister. The chest cavity has been blown open, or pried open and charred some other way, maybe, because the spark casing is left intact. But Misfire had been right—there’s no energon left in this mech’s lines. Where there should be a soft glow of purple-y pink lining the spark, there’s just black rusted metal and sand.

“This doesn’t look good,” he says, mostly to himself.

“Thanks, Captain Obvious, for your contribution,” Krok replies. He’s started clicking again, and Misfire is glaring at his hand.

“Well, O Glorious Leader, what do you suggest we do?” Misfire demands of Krok, standing up so that he can use his height to his advantage.

Drift hums over a thought that’s been floating around in his head. He doesn’t know to what extent it’ll actually serve them, but it might help them get away from this planet from it before whatever direness mounting in their situation reaches a peak. “What about the oil? Maybe some of that synthesizing equipment is still set up in the mines.”

Krok abruptly stops clicking. “Excuse me?”

“Oil?” Crankcase says in his usual growl. “Mines?” He sounds like he’s never heard of such things.

“Uh, do you guys not read the Autopedia pages for the planets you go to?” Drift asks, rising to stand again.

This earns him a collective blank stare. Crankcase grunts something Drift can’t pick out about reading. Spinister is still fidgeting with the device that had been stuck to his chest. Misfire snorts. “What are you, some kind of nerd? We just look for planets in the area that have had big battles. Why would we want to learn about them?” The twist he puts on the word ‘learn’ sounds rather derisive.

“It does all sort of start to sound the same,” Fulcrum admits.

“Okay, well, this planet was staked out by the Decepticons because it had oil on it that could be used to synthesize energon. And it’s not unheard of for mechs working on resource planets to stash some away for their own use.” Which was something he learned more from cheating some of the higher ranking officials out of a little of their private stores by beating them at dice games when he’d visited. But Megatron didn’t need to know that, and neither do the Scavengers.

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?!” Crankcase demands. “We’re wasting our own fuel rummaging through this junk heap.”

Drift purses his lips before changing his expression to an innocent smile. “It’s still a long shot. We’d have to figure out how to operate the synthesizing equipment, if it’s even still functional.” He doesn’t mention that none of them are exactly science-oriented, because he isn’t either.  

“It’s worth a look,” Fulcrum says, standing from where he’d also been kneeling near a body. “Right?”

“I’ll decide if it’s worth a look or not.” Krok is still clicking.

The rest of them stare at him expectantly. It takes him a moment to notice, as he’s still preoccupied with looking down at the masses of gore around them and drumming his fingers over his chest. Three of the ones in the most immediate vicinity have deployed those strange little traps out of otherwise empty chests, and the rest of the bodies they’d picked over with their torn open chests and eviscerated systems all seem to indicate the same thing—these bots have been drained, and there’s nothing left amongst the hundred thousand corpses to sustain seven more lives.

“Fine,” he says. “It’s worth a look.”

.

.

.

They spare the small amount of fuel they have left to move the WAP over to the old abandoned mines. It’s a last-ditch effort to gather what they need to get off Sarkas and shove off onto some other planet that’s hopefully much less creepy.

Over here, away from the nearest edge of the battle, there’s no wind and no haunting, howling song. There might be a light breeze, but it’s nothing like the gale of the winds blowing closer to the site of the carnage. This side of the planet seems brighter, more saturated in color, and a little less likely to house the monster said to lurk about Sarkas and eat mechs. Drift has begun to quietly entertain the idea that it might be real.

Looking at the rigs still makes Drift a little uneasy. Their tall, gangly skeletons stand eerily still across the landscape, arranged in a pattern that makes it clear where the veins lie. Their group wanders between them towards the processing unit, which has been carved into a hunk of a cliff nearby.

Maybe what bothers Drift so much about is the relative lack of bodies, compared to the battleground on the other side of this rock. Without the graveyard over here, this unsupervised equipment seems haunting and out of place. Drift thinks again of the monster, and decides that actually, this would be a much more pleasant hideout for a giant beast than the wreckage of the battlefield. This does little to reassure him.

There are a few bodies inside. All of them are, of course, dead.

“Krok,” Spinister shouts from near Drift. He’s standing at some kind of broken piece of machinery, near which there’s a dead mech slung over it with a blast shot through his spark.

Krok looks up, and Spinister continues, “Didn’t you say the Autobots pick up their dead?”

“Yeah,” Krok yells back. “So?”

“So this guy’s an Autobot, and he’s dead.” Spinister nudges the guy, who doesn’t move, and then pulls his gun and puts a blast through the guy’s spark. There is, predictably, no reaction. “Yeah, dead.”

Krok, Fulcrum, and Crankcase wander over to Spinister, but Drift stays where he is. He feels an uneasy prickling all throughout his spine, and it still seems like he should be understanding something that he’s not. His optics scan frantically over the machinery in front of him, the rest of the quarry around the room, and the ghostly still rigs outside. He still can’t place it.

“Who cares if they missed a guy or two?” Misfire asks, then grumbles more quietly, “I’m already at half a tank.”

Drift remembers seeing Misfire down a full can of energon from the fridge yesterday. It doesn’t make sense that in that amount of time he would have burned so much fuel.

“Don’t touch him,” Krok says to the rest of them as they hover around the body, which does indeed have an Autobot symbol on it.

“Don’t overheat over it,” Crankcase says, taking a step away from Krok. “Jeez, what are you so warm for?”

“I’m with Misfire,” Fulcrum says, stepping back from the body. “This place is weird, and it’s not getting any less so. I mean the weird gruesome deaths, that nasty wind… Fake traps, organic bones, dead Autobots… I don’t like any of this. The sooner we can get out of here, the better.”

“Wait,” Drift says suddenly. “Organic bones?” Something shifts into place. “You found organic bones?”

Fulcrum shudders. “Yeah, back by this really nasty display. There were a bunch of them all lying in front of it. I...” He shudders again. “I touched one by accident. I was trying to forget.”

Drift is brimming with excitement. He’s so close now to figuring it out, he’s sure of it. “Just give me a second.” He casts around the room, keeping his arms outstretched as if that’ll help him connect with the mysteries of this place better, trying to spark something clearly buried deep in his memory to break them out of whatever horror is surely coming for them.

At least, until Krok collapses, making a loud clang as he bangs his helm against the machine with the Autobot slung over it, and they both fall to the floor.

“Krok!”

“What the—”

“Did Krok just pass out?” Misfire slurs. He’s leaning against another machine and straightens up, coming over to the rest of them before, very suddenly, he also falls forward.

Crankcase looks up from Krok’s still, prone form. “He’s in stasis.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been likeeee three weeks, I've been super busy and I ended up rewriting this entire chapter I think by the end of it. So that was some work. I think by the time this fic is finished I will have written it twice :'')
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Oh by the way,** there is more **gore** in this chapter although for what it's worth it's all post mortem and probably the most graphic this fic is going to get in terms of violence, so beware if that's something you're sensitive to.

Fulcrum looks from Krok to Misfire and back up at the rest of them. _“What_ is going on?”

Drift kneels next to Misfire, turning him over and shaking him gently. The breeze from outside rustles along his back as some kind of eerie reminder that just because they’re not at the center of all the death doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen. As if he needed one. He’s not a doctor, but it looks like Misfire is also in stasis.

Drift has a deep pang in his spark as he wishes Ratchet were here. Or Rodimus. Both of them, really. There’s still things that aren’t fitting together right, and Drift has a sense that they’re running out of time. Something is still off, and he needs to figure out what.

“Give me a second,” he mutters, standing up and holding his hands up again to a very bewildered Fulcrum, Crankcase, and Spinister. He’s still trying and failing to find the answer somewhere in this room, but nothing about these few scattered corpses and all this old mining machinery is sparking any inspiration.

“You gonna clue us in any time soon to what this hand-waving business is about?” Crankcase grunts, surprisingly lackluster as he leans against a nearby piece of equipment. “In case you haven’t noticed, two of us just collapsed, and— and...”

And, inevitably, Crankcase passes out next.

Fulcrum stares at him and puts a hand to his helm. “I don’t mind being the first to say it—I’m a little concerned about this,” he says faintly.

Spinister has pulled his gun again and appears to be looking around for some unseen assailant.

Fulcrum continues, lifting his hand from his helm and looking about wearily. “Is it the traps doing this? There was nothing in them though…” There’s a slight note of panic in his voice, Drift thinks.

“We need to figure out what’s wrong with them,” Drift answers distractedly. “Why they’re in stasis. This still doesn’t make sense.”

“You sound like you know more than the rest of us,” Fulcrum complains, looking at him expectantly.

Spinister has knelt next to Crankcase upon hearing Drift’s words. Carefully, he opens the mech up and conducts a very short examination before saying, “He’s out of fuel.”

“Out of fuel?” Drift echoes, bewildered. “Totally?”

“Pretty much,” Spinister confirms.

“How can that be?” Fulcrum asks. “None of us were that low. Even if he wasn’t saying anything to keep us from worrying… Are the others the same?”

“Check Misfire,” Drift suggests. Hadn’t he _just_ said he was at half a tank?

Spinister closes Crankcase up before moving over to Misfire and doing the same operation. The result is even quicker this time. “Yep, no fuel.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Fulcrum says, voicing the thought that keeps repeating over and over in Drift’s head Spinister is checking Krok, but he senses the result is going to be the same. Fulcrum continues, “Why the three of them, and not us?”

It’s funny that in the midst of this crisis, Drift can’t stop thinking, _What would Rodimus do?_ It’s a question that carries its own specific kind of weight. He’d gotten so used to having a whole team behind him to help solve mysteries, led by Rodimus’ particular kind of ingenuity that always happened to get them out of dire situations before they got too hopeless. And it was that kind of faith in Rodimus that made him feel like he had to leave, rather than disrupt the main crux of their quest by letting him take the fall. He stands by that decision, for all the pain it’s caused him, but he still feels the loss in this moment as he casts around the room and sees three new companions possibly dead from some cause he can’t puzzle out.

 _What would Rodimus do?_ He feels like the answer to that could honestly be ‘Consult Perceptor and Brainstorm,’ but they aren’t here, and neither is Rodimus, so they’ll have to make do with what they have.

Wait.

Perceptor...and Brainstorm…

Brainstorm?

Brainstorm! There’s something there!

Another memory bursts up from the back of his processor and nags for his full attention. A day on the Lost Light ages ago, where Drift had been going over precautions with Brainstorm regarding Prowl’s stupid little Autobot Phase Sixer pet project, but at the time he’d been taking the duty seriously. Brainstorm had been working on something…

_“They’re ingenious really,” Brainstorm explains, rambling about whatever he’s got on his bench, as he has been doing since Drift walked in. “This little race of organics created them, and at first I dismissed them because they’d only gotten halfway there, see, but then it caught my attention and I had to see if my theories on how to complete them were right.”_

_“Brainstorm, I’m trying to talk about something serious,” Drift says, trying to call the scientist’s attention away from his little pet project before their window of opportunity closes._

_“Okay, but look.” He dabs his finger down carefully onto an empty plate and points it at Drift’s optics. “What do you see?”_

_Drift sighs. He realizes he won’t be able to get Brainstorm to talk business with him until he indulges whatever science experiment he has so unwisely involved himself in, and given he has limited time before Perceptor comes back, he figures he should start engaging sooner rather than later if he ever wants to get the items on his agenda worked out. “I don’t see anything,” he admits, hoping without any real conviction that that might be the end of it._

_“Exactly,” Brainstorm says, his glee written plainly on the part of his face visible above the mask. He crushes his thumb against his index finger and holds it up to Drift’s optics again. “Now look, what do you see?”_

_Drift spares a disinterested glance before replying. “I still don’t see anything, Brainstorm.”_

_“Ah! Look closer, though.”_

_“We really need to talk about—”_

_“Look!” Brainstorm insists, nearly jabbing his finger against Drift’s nasal ridge._

_Drift stares at him a moment, then shifts his optics back to his finger, zooming in a little bit more. He can’t help worrying this is going to be some kind of unsavory joke, but he hopes Brainstorm’s excitement tends to lend itself to genuine scientific miracles rather than the chance to pull one over on command officers. When his optics focus in, he notices a tiny little smidgen of pink smeared across the grey paint. “Is it...energon?” he guesses, reluctant to admit now his interest is a little piqued now, but successfully hiding it, he thinks. Not that it will matter either way; Brainstorm will not be deterred, only placated._

_Brainstorm draws his hand back to clench it into an ecstatic fist and pumps it into the air. “Yes! It’s energon! All it would take is one of these to put a mech into stasis. Ask me how.”_

_Drift feels his arms cross, but resists the urge to tap his foot. He twists his head around to check that the door is still closed and Perceptor hasn’t quite made it back yet. “Okay, how?”_

_“Nanites! Nanites that perform only two functions: Siphon fuel, and reproduce, in that order.” Brainstorm is giddy, the tips of his wings visibly shaking as he tries and somewhat fails to contain himself. “They’re so small that you wouldn’t notice them coming out of you carrying just a little bit of fuel at a time, and they’re so efficient that they can use a tiny, insignificant amount to reproduce. But because they’re so small and lightweight, they can’t move themselves. So the only thing left to properly weaponize them is to find a way to get them_ out _reliably, and I’ll have you know I’m already halfway done with a prototype—”_

_Drift holds up a hand, hoping to prevent this conversation from getting graphic. He’s been punished before for asking Ratchet too many questions, and getting more of an answer than he’d bargained for, and he’s hesitant to make the same mistake again. “Okay, thanks for the insight. Good to know those hours you logged towards fixing the faulty gravity generator in Sector 4 were actually spent— Let me guess, improving organic technology with the intent to sell the fully weaponized version back to them—so they can use it against us?”_

_Brainstorm’s wings droop and he seems to lose that vibrating energy that had ripped through him. “Maybe,” he blurts out, before abruptly switching to business mode. “Didn’t you want to talk about our little Basement Buddy? You know Percy’s gonna be back any minute.” He then mutters, “Also, fixing the generator took ten minutes and I had free time.”_

Drift now regrets cutting Brainstorm off in the interest of discussing how to further entrench them in the Overlord situation, but he suppose one situation begets the other in this case and tries to move on.

Fulcrum is hovering near Spinister as he crouches over Krok’s open chest. “Him too,” Spinister says. “I don’t get it.”

Drift can only assume that Brainstorm completed his prototype. He’s suffering from a bit of an information overload as he tries to parse through the rest of this mystery with this newfound revelation of something that could only _possibly_ be the cause of this.

He scans the room, looking for more evidence to support or deny his theory, though he has no idea what that might be and why it might present itself to him in this room as opposed to anywhere else on this entire planet.

He stops and turns to Fulcrum and Spinister, hesitating. It’s a little ironic that he’d been lamenting the loss of the Lost Light crew as resources to puzzle out a mystery when he does have options here, still, for now.

“Spinister, how likely are you to freak out if I told you you’re going to pass out next?” he asks, realizing the statement this question addresses is embedded within it, but choosing to have faith that the answer will be favorable and going ahead anyway.

Spinister presses Krok’s chest closed with a click and stands up. He twists around to peer out the mouth of the cave, then turns back and flips out one finger, then two on one hand, his thumb on the other, gazing up at the ceiling for a moment, tallying factors that must make sense only to him. He’s quiet for about 30 seconds, during which Fulcrum doesn’t stop looking between him and Drift, and then he says, “Thirty-four percent. Why?”

“Because we’re going to need your help,” Drift says firmly. He’s is already moving over to a small, dusty supply chest he’d peeked into earlier, cracking it open and rummaging through it until he finds what he’s looking for—just a small container. He pops a panel on his arm and starts draining some of his own fuel into it.

“Hang on,” Fulcrum says, holding up his hands as he eyes Drift’s arm. “Can you explain before you just start bleeding yourself out in front of us?”

“I don’t know how much time I have to explain,” Drift says. “But I think you were right—it was the traps.”

Drift pauses, distracted by his task of trying not to drain himself completely, and in the brief time Spinister somehow manages to say a little too late, “Oh, now I get it.” He nods, apparently to himself, and to his credit does not freak out.

Drift stops the flow as the energon nears the top of the container and his remaining supply is uncomfortably low, but manageable. “I’m guessing on everything, but yeah, I think you’re next. And I’m sorry to say I think we need you to hang on until you can get us back to the other side of the planet—so we can save everyone.” Never mind he doesn’t have a complete plan, but he wants to make it clear this isn’t kind of ‘noble death’ scenario, it’s a means to an end. “I’m pretty sure the WAP won’t get us much further, and besides, I think Crankcase wouldn’t like it too much if I messed with his control settings.”

“He’s not in much of a position to care right now,” Fulcrum says drily. “But you’re still not explaining… There was nothing in the traps. And what’s—” He gestures to Drift’s vial of energon, “—this about?”

“Again, I’m guessing, but I think there was actually something in the traps. Fuel-draining, automatically-reproducing nanites. You wouldn’t see them or feel them. I’m pretty sure I know the guy who’s responsible for the tech, but I doubt he would have set this up so I’m not sure where to go from there.” He holds up the little container of energon as an offering to Spinister, who takes it and stares at it as if he’s not sure what to do with it. “I’m betting the only reason Spinister still hasn’t gone into stasis is just because bigger mechs have more fuel.”

Spinister seems to consider this and looks to Fulcrum.

Fulcrum still looks concerned as he eyes the little container of Drift’s fuel. “It seems a little on the nose that you just happen to know about _fuel-sucking nanites_ , but I guess it makes sense. Except if they’re draining fuel, where is the fuel going? There was barely any left in the others. If we don’t have answers to that, you could be wrong. There could be something else.” He gestures vaguely to their comrades on the ground. Drift notices he seems to have calmed down a little now that they’re pooling their information, and he’s thankful to have more brains working on this, even if they still seem far from the solution.

“I could be,” Drift admits. “I still don’t know how the nanites are getting out and where they’re going, and that’s a problem.” Spinister is still holding the vial of Drift’s energon, looking back and forth between Fulcrum and Drift.

Fulcrum sighs. “What else do you know? It’s hard to act without knowing what’s going on, but we don’t have anything else to go on but your theory.”

Spinister is no longer looking at either of them. His attention seems to have been captured by something on the ceiling.

Drift paces out his rising anxiety as he lists off things on his fingers. “There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense, and I feel like it all has to be connected. Obviously we have the traps in the mechs, all of whom are completely drained of energon. We have three mechs down who’d gotten hit by the traps, one who hasn’t. I happen to know there is such a thing as little nanites that drain fuel, which may or may not be related. And then there’s other weird things, like these Mortilus shrines in all the wreckage, the dead Autobots, and—” Drift turns back to Fulcrum. “Didn’t you mention organic bones?”

Fulcrum shivers again. “Yeah. And you’re right, it’s—”

“Weird,” Drift insists. “It has to be connected.”

“If you’re right, we might not have time to figure it out.” He and Drift stare at each other grimly. Spinister loses interest in what’s on the ceiling, and Fulcrum presses his lips together. “How do we take down these nanites?”

Drift paces again, popping the hilt on a sword as he tries to think. “I think Brainstorm was working on some kind of control mechanism for them. He said they couldn’t move on their own. I just don’t know what kind of thing could be pulling the fuel out of people without us noticing anything.”

“Well, duh,” Spinister snorts, as if what Drift had said is as obvious as water being wet.

Drift and Fulcrum stare at him, and when he doesn’t speak fast enough, Fulcrum motions with his hand. “What? What’s duh?” he says quickly.

“The wind?” Spinister suggests slowly, pointing towards the mouth of the cave. As if to prove his point, that gentle breeze that just barely reaches over this side of the planet tickles their plating teasingly.

Drift and Fulcrum’s optics widen at the same time. “There’s nothing natural about this wind, dead planet or no,” Fulcrum says decisively.

It does feel obvious, now that he’s said it. “The wind would be able to get through any plating and carry out tiny amounts of fuel,” Drift murmurs. This is exactly what Brainstorm would do. This has got to be the answer.

“We need to find the source.”

“I’ve got a hunch,” Drift says, stepping back towards the part of the room he’d been investigating earlier and resuming his search as he speaks. “We follow the weird— To the organic bones, or the biggest, nastiest display of death we can find.” He looks back to Spinister, who’s still holding the little container full of energon. “We’re going to need you to last that long, so you might want to…” Drift motions vaguely. He’s still not sure if Spinister has a face, and he hasn’t asked.

Fulcrum hesitates where he stands. His optics fall on the box Drift had grabbed the vial from and he picks one of his own out and starts draining a little of his own fuel into it, with a much less practiced hand, Drift notes, with a moment of grim reflection on his own history.

“I suppose you have an idea of how to disable this thing once we find it?” Fulcrum asks.

“I want to take a leaf out of your book,” Drift says. He resists the urge to give a dry laugh along with it.

“What book?” Spinister asks, scrutinizing Fulcrum as if he might be hiding some kind of secret library in his subspace. He’s holding one empty vial of energon and sets it down when Fulcrum offers him a fresh one.

Drift is haphazardly throwing items from the boxes in search of his prize. He reaches the bottom of the box and grips the sides, bracing himself against it as he looks at them. “We blow it up.”

Fulcrum and Spinister look at each other, then at Drift.

“At least it’s a simple plan,” Fulcrum says wryly, tempting Drift to ask whose idea it had been to blow _him_ up, optics drifting towards Misfire prone on the ground with an unconfirmed theory.

“We have to find that oil,” Drift explains, lifting a fresh box onto the one he’s just emptied to sort through. “We’re not going to be able to spare any more fuel. And we need to spread out, so...” He motions for them to get moving.

Drift feels a little better armed with a plan, but is still acutely aware of that soft, constant, unnatural breeze filtering in through the mouth of the cave and now cognizant of the effect that has on their timeline. He reaches the bottom of the box and feels his spark contract. This is getting him nowhere. Surely when the plant was compromised, the Decepticons would have transported all of the oil off the planet to keep it from falling into Autobot hands. He stares out to the ghostly rigs positioned outside, but quickly abandons that thought as well. Even if they could figure out how to work the machinery, it would probably take longer than they have to actually pull some out of the earth, provided there’s any left to salvage.

No, if any oil remains on this planet, the only way it could have survived would be if it was hidden.

Another minute ticks by, and it’s lost on him as he stares into the box as if he’s trying to think his way out of it.

“Find anything?” Drift distantly hears Fulcrum call out. Drift feels his engine begin to strain slightly now himself, aware of the low-fuel warning popping up on his HUD. It’ll last him a day if he doesn’t exert himself too much, but he’d given Spinister all that he could spare to keep functioning. If what he and Fulcrum gave doesn’t last, they’re completely out of luck. He keeps staring into the dark, dusty box.

“Half an energon stick and a box of dice,” Spinister calls back. “I’m not sharing.”

And suddenly, another old, old memory is bubbling up from old fragmented files deep in his storage. He remembers sneaking off while Megatron was preoccupied with going over battle strategies with Soundwave, or something. Deadlock had snuck off to take up one of the ranking officers at the mine on an offer of some friendly gambling. The guy had probably been flirting with him and hadn’t realized how badly him and his buddies would lose. Obviously there was very little in it for him, because Drift doesn’t even remember his name or really even his face, so he must not have indulged the guy. But what he does remember is being led off to some discrete corner deep in the inner rooms built into the rock to some dingy closet, and a trick panel swinging on a hinge to claim his prize.

If that mech was still around when the base got attacked, Drift is fairly confident he would have snuck off with as much as he could. But maybe, if there wasn’t enough time...

Drift casts around the ruined room. Time hasn’t been kind to this place. The walls have shifted and crumbled in from where they’d once been carefully carved out, and it doesn’t look as pristine and orderly as it used to. Debris has blown in, and of course the battle has left machines and rows of neat, orderly boxes upturned and scattered across the floor. But if he focuses, he can find it, and he does—in the back where there must have been a cave in, nearly obscured by a fallen piece of machinery. He spares the little extra burst of fuel to transform in order to zip over to it faster, springing out of his alt mode and heaving his full weight against the machine.

“Hey, help me move this!” he calls to Spinister and Fulcrum, rushing over to the machine and trying to lift under the torn edge of it. They hurry over, and between the three of them, the machine flips easily and the doorway is free. Feeling a rush of hope, Drift yanks open the rusted door and hurries into the dusty room, navigating around a path he’s traveled once, guided, he’s sure, by Primus’ grace, to a familiar looking trick panel in the wall. He twists it up on the one anchored hinge easily and peers into the dusty enclosure.

.

.

.

They have no other choice but to leave Krok, Crankcase, and Misfire in the processing unit alongside the fallen Autobot bodies and the upturned contents of the station, taking with them nothing more than a couple drums of raw, explosive oil. Drift and Fulcrum each have one tucked under an arm as the other grips onto available handholds of Spinister’s alt-mode. As they fly closer to the mass of bodies, the wind picks up in force and volume, and now that they’re aware of it, it does feel like it’s sucking them in. That eerie howling scrapes across their audials once again. Now knowing it could be the source of their demise, Drift feels a little more justified in finding it sufficiently unsettling. Not that that does much to make him feel better.

“Whatever you do, don’t push it if you’re going to run out fuel,” Drift yells over the blustering sound of the wind, and rotors on top of it, to get Spinister to hear him. “The last thing we need is for me and Fulcrum to get infected too by dropping out of the sky into a pile of bodies. This close to the source and this low on fuel, we’d probably go into stasis within seconds.”

“Yep,” Spinister calls back simply.

“And if you get to half a tank, set down right away and tell us!” Drift continues. If Drift’s math is right, that’s when there’s likely to be the most nanites siphoning fuel at a time, and from there it’s a steep slope down to stasis.

“Yep,” Spinister says again.

Drift tries not to imagine they’re sinking lower and lower in the sky and tries to listen for the sound of slowing rotors. Despite the howling of the wind, it feels like a long, silent stretch of time.

“If any of this involves wading through a pile of bones, not it,” Fulcrum says to Drift, perhaps as an attempt to lighten the mood. It’s a little ruined by the fact that he has to shout it to be heard.

He probably isn’t joking, Drift decides.

“Hey, do you see that?” Fulcrum shouts after another minute, pointing through the haze of the wind and dirt. He’s got better visibility with his goggles than Drift does, but Drift also sees a curiously bright patch through the grime whipping around through the air—something that could be tinted energon-pink. “We’re close to those last coordinates I clocked. I think we should land!”

Drift swallows his relief as they head deeper into the thickest gusts. They’d been flying above the absolute worst of it, but the closer they get to the ground—and all the bodies—the worse it is. He’s still hyper aware for the sound of stalling engines, or anything like that, looking for a safe place clear of trapped corpses to try to land. Between the amounts of fuel he and Fulcrum donated to Spinister, he imagines he would have been nearly back up to full. It’s just a matter of how efficient those nanites have been at reproducing in Spinister’s tank and sucking up the new stuff before being blown out of him.

It’s rocky, and Drift nearly loses his grip as the winds try to loosen it, but they manage to get low enough in a patch clear of bodies that the drop is safe. Drift and Fulcrum still stumble as they land, given that the wind tries to blow them off course, but they keep their hold on the oil and manage to right themselves.

Drift realizes he’s nearly fallen into what Fulcrum must have found earlier, and to him it looks like a mass grave. Not of Cybertronians, but of something smaller, probably bipedal, definitely non-metallic in composition. Realizing where they’ve landed, Fulcrum steps backwards and starts cursing into the wind, shaking out his hands. Spinister lands behind him in root mode, gaze slowly tilting upwards as he likely notices what has also caught Drift’s attention.

The altar is a monument to a kind of gruesome horror that hadn’t even occurred so commonly over four million years of war. War is just death. This, like Megatron had said, could, in poor taste, be called art.

Bodies have been arranged and posed in unnatural ways, vandalized by having internal systems and limbs ripped off and contorted to almost depict some kind of scene. They’re all facing upwards towards the sky as if presenting their warped and twisted selves to, presumably, Mortilus.

Windswept streaks of energon-colored paint streak down the cheeks of Cybertronians missing optics, or even holding them dislodged from empty sockets by cords. They spill their spines through their open mouths, tugging their heads around in knots through their own gutted midsections, all bent towards one focal point at the top of the arrangement.

At the center of it, visible even through the dust clouding the air, is a purplish light, almost black, glowing between the visible gaps, indicative of some kind of device shielded by the defiled corpses, with all the wind rushing into that point. And spilling out the top of it.

“This is it,” Drift shouts, though he doesn’t know if either of them are within hearing range of him. “It has to be.” It’s really something to behold. Drift is starting to piece together an impossible theory—that somehow it was that pile of dead organics that had done this. He never saw anything this grotesque dealing with the upsurgence in the Decepticon ranks alongside Megatron. To be fair, his role in it was largely disinterested and relatively minor, but something about this speaks to a grander kind of awe than might be held by the most religious of Cybertronians. This speaks to him, spiritually, not of reverence, but of fear.

Drift stands still in front of this massive, twisted offering to a god that doesn’t even belong to the dead in the hole, but to those it’s made of. He looks down, feeling a strange pang as he wonders what kind of people could have done this—and he notices something. A plaque laid against the base of the bodies, depicting the symbol of Mortilus.

He narrows his eyes at it and refuses to read it. They don’t have time, and even if they did, Drift isn’t sure he wants to know what they were trying to do with this. Even if you discount desecrating a graveyard, lives were lost because of this mechanism—Cybertronians trying to bury their dead or recover a loved one—and to him that’s senseless death, undeserving of acknowledgement. Their war was a lot of things, but it disturbs him to think of it being a spectacle for other races to profit over.

The plaque will now serve a purpose, though. He sets his oil drum against it. They need to avoid touching the bodies, and they aren’t going to get much closer to the center than this.

Fulcrum is coming up to tiptoe around the grave, joining him at last and setting the drum next to Drift’s. “We need some way to detonate it,” Drift shouts to him, wishing they’d thought of this earlier.

“Well, Spinister has a _gun_ ,” Fulcrum points out, gesturing over his shoulder.

Oh, so they had thought of that earlier.

“Better than what I was thinking,” Drift nods, feeling a bit sheepish. They follow Spinister a distance from the offering through the thick wind, which, now that they’re in it, Drift can nearly see the lines as they flow directly behind them into the altar.

“What was your idea?” Fulcrum asks conversationally, though he still has to shout.

“Something about self-sacrifice, probably. Or throwing a sword might have worked. Anyway, don’t worry about it.” Surprising even himself, Drift smiles under his dust mask. It helps him resist thinking that even if they do this, they might not be able to recover any energon and save the others, or themselves. This could still be the end.

He hears Fulcrum laugh, which is almost more comforting. “Yeah, I tried that once. It didn’t even work. Don’t worry, I think this plan is better.”

They get a good distance away, to the point where Drift can barely make out the outline of the grave pit a couple hundred meters away. Spinister is kneeling over a scrap of wrecked hull, steadying his arm on it as he squints through the wreckage. Fulcrum and Drift duck behind it as well.

“Ready...” Spinister calls through the howling wind song.

“Steady…” Drift feels a significant bit of heat coming off his right shoulder where Spinister is poised.

“I’m at half a tank, by the way. You said to say.” Barely half a second later, Spinister’s head thunks down on the hull as he falls into stasis. The gun goes off at the same moment, and he falls sideways onto Drift as they hear a massive creaking as part of the carefully arranged structure of bodies collapses.

Drift wriggles out from under Spinister’s scalding form, letting him fall against the sand a little rougher than he’d meant to.

“Somehow, I feel like we should have expected that,” Fulcrum says from the other side of the ship hull.

“I can’t believe he lasted this long,” Drift shouts, trying to adjust Spinister a little and giving up fairly quickly because the wind is strong and the mech is heavy.

Fulcrum comes back around the hull when he’s retrieved the gun. He offers it to Drift. “I have a sneaking suspicion you’re a better shot than me.”

Drift stares at the weapon splayed in his hand. It’s been ages since he even held a gun, let alone fire one. He takes it and is surprised that it now feels a little unfamiliar in his hand, although of course Deadlock did tend to prefer something a little less understated than a pistol.

He doesn’t answer Fulcrum, but wordlessly fits the gun into his hand and tries to focus himself. It used to be so natural to him. He rarely ever had to think about aiming, blowback. Whatever else was going on around him was irrelevant. Deadlock had been more reckless, of course, and sometimes Drift is surprised that he survived at all. It’s true now that he has no enemy assailants to worry about, and the wind is nearly guiding a straight path forward for him despite all the debris it’s kicking up into his optics, but there’s still a part of him wondering if he can hit the mark.

Drift closes his optics briefly, taking in a vent through his nose and letting the air warm his flimsy makeshift dust mask as he visualizes hitting the oil, the thick, warm plumes of smoke and fire that would rise from an accurate shot, blasting the wind backwards and inviting still air once again. He opens his optics again, focused sharply on that point at the end of the rushing streams of wind, framed by lines of dust rushing past them. He utters a short prayer that he thinks Fulcrum probably doesn’t hear, and squeezes the trigger.

Nothing happens.

Drift waits.

Nothing else collapses, and there’s certainly no explosion.

Fulcrum coughs. “Uh, I put the safety on before I gave it to you. I thought you knew.”

“Sure I did. I was just...you know. Visualizing.” Fulcrum doesn’t reply to him, but Drift thinks he might have heard an, ‘Uh huh,’ disappear between the notes of the whistling wind around them.

He clicks the safety off and quiets down again, trying to draw in on the seriousness of the situation to bring him out of his minor, untimely embarrassment. But it’s true, the fate of all of them depends on him making this shot, on his plan, and on his theory. His own fuel warning is blinking softly on his HUD, trying to urge him to replenish his stores, and he lets that synchronized flashing center him. The noise dies down finally as his audials focus on the inward noises of his engine, and he feels the reverberations of his spark as it thrums within him.

He pulls the trigger.

Before Drift has a chance to register what’s happening, he’s being thrown backwards by a powerful explosion for the second time in far too short a period, as far as he’s concerned. The smoke blooms up in a massive, unfurling ocean of grey, and the heat radiates outward in a thick avalanche over him, and wind and dirt are blown in every direction with what Drift imagines would be more than enough force to disintegrate a small Autobot shuttle. pink rain cascades down around him, wetting his cheeks as he stares up at the sky.

.

.

.

“I feel so dumb that I didn’t figure it out!” Misfire smacks the heel of his hand against his helm. He’s filling in the blanks of their mystery as they complete fuel checks on the WAP and prepare to leave. Drift watches Misfire gesticulate with a soft smile on his face as he leans against the wall of the control room next to Fulcrum. “I watched that documentary on organic televangelists adopting Cybertronian gods weeks ago with Grimlock. I was trying to teach him about culture.”

“So, three million years ago there was this planet full of organics, I think near here somewhere—forget their name, forget their planet, didn’t care, might have been drunk, don’t remember—and eventually they evolved their tech enough to get to space and made contact with Cybertronians and found out about the Leading Hand—”

“The Guiding Hand?” Drift suggests gently, smile deepening.

“Yeah, whatever, something like that. And I guess they had all this lore about some god creating planets because they could, like, see stuff from our war happening far away. So they found out about Primus and they were like, ‘Cool, makes sense.’ So these super weird organics were worshipping our gods.”

Fulcrum snorts. Drift nearly does as well, given Misfire’s outrageous expression, but he manages to keep himself composed.

“Yeah, I know,” Misfire says, quickly interrupting himself to magnanimously acknowledge his small, captive audience. “But then when they got into space, they saw piles of dead Cybertronians everywhere, and they figured if we could die or be killed or whatever, then Mortilian—”

“Mortilus,” Drift corrects.

Misfire doesn’t even acknowledge him this time. “—was still alive, then he’d be coming for them next.”

“Good riddance,” Fulcrum says, also smiling.

“Yeah so they’d make big offerings to him on planets they could reach that had had battles, and then they’d kill themselves too I guess, which, like, again, kind of seems to defeat the purpose of not having him kill them, but whatever. But before that, they would set up these traps to keep anyone from messing with the bodies because they thought that would detract from their offering.”

“Kinda wish you had remembered any of that before we stopped here,” Crankcase grunts. He’s sipping on some of the energon that mostly Drift and Fulcrum had siphoned off of relatively dust free surfaces. “Tastes okay, at least,” he says, mostly to himself. “A little gritty.” _Relatively_ dust free. Crankcase punches in a few more settings to the control panel and Drift can hear the subtle hum of the engines kicking up. “Say goodbye, we’re leaving orbit.”

“Rust in piece, suck-aft,” Misfire shouts towards the screen as they leave the orbit of the planet. He looks around the control room, poorly hiding his eagerness. “You know, cuz it sounds like ‘Sarkas’?” He waits, not long enough for anyone to react, and leans back in his chair, sulking. “Tough crowd.”

“I got it,” Drift says indulgently. He realizes in that instant that he has, despite considering this a temporary stop, grown very fond of the worn, patched interior of the WAP, debilitatingly fuel inefficient though it may be. Anyway, they’ve more than remedied that problem, for the time being, and he’s decided to make it his personal mission to peruse Autopedia for any mysterious warnings on any of the future planets they intend to land on. He might also work through a backlog of Misfire’s late night television indulgences, just in case.

“Glad to be off that rock,” Krok says, also looking at the screen as Sarkas grows smaller and smaller. He, too, seems like he’s talking to himself more than anyone else.

“I told you it was bad news as soon as we set down.” Fulcrum says, shrugging.

Krok turns his head and stares at Fulcrum for a minute, optics flicking up and down his scrawny frame once. “What do you want, a medal?”

“Hey, Drift and I saved all of you.” He bumps his shoulder up next to Drift’s and mimics his pose by crossing his own arms. Drift’s field tingles at the pleasant camaraderie of the sensation, and he can’t help leaning into it. He smiles at Fulcrum next to him, and Krok across from him, who’s managing to frown despite not having a mouth.

Spinister looks at Fulcrum expectantly, from where he’s been quietly cleaning his gun this whole time, but Fulcrum just shrugs. “You still passed out in the end, and we had to gather all that fuel ourselves.”

“Again, do you want a medal?” Krok asks. “Because you’re not getting one. We all did what we had to, and everything was fixed like it always is, and now we move on.”

Fulcrum leans in to whisper in Drift’s audial, hiding his mouth with his hand. “That means ‘Thanks’ in Krok-speak.”

“I said ‘Thanks’ earlier,” Krok objects, clearly still listening despite the finality of his earlier statement.

“I don’t remember that,” Drift dares to murmur.

“He uses it in a sentence, to avoid saying it actually _to us_ ,” Fulcrum explains.

“Ooooooh,” Misfire coos, grinning.

“I’ll thank the Idiot Brigade to keep their mouths shut,” Krok growls, giving a click or two. “If you’ll deign to excuse me I’m gonna go drink some of the dirty fuel you _glorious rescuers_ managed to get us by blowing up a mountain of corpses and a _big fan_.” He then trudges out of the control room and calls up the stairs, “If anyone needs me, suck it up.”

“I’m included in ‘glorious rescuers,’” Spinister decides, then goes back to polishing his gun.

“Sounds like you were included in the Idiot Brigade,” Misfire tells Drift. He points to himself and Fulcrum conspiratorially and whispers, “That’s us.”

“Wow, a promotion,” Drift drawls with feigned amazement.

“Congratulations,” Fulcrum says, offering to shake his hand. Drift takes it and feels another soft swell in his spark when their metal touches and lets the comfort of it warm him.

When they let go, Fulcrum pats him on the shoulder cordially as he and Misfire move to leave, chattering to themselves. Drift notices Crankcase eye him as if he expects him to go off and join them. But Drift stays leaning against the wall, watching the stars and space fill the screen and indulging this quiet contentedness he feels, and the pilot doesn’t say anything. And slowly, the silence that takes up space in the room grows to fill the space, feeling quite different now at the end of their day from the one that had started it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I guess that's the end of the first little 'arc' whatever that means in the context of fanfiction. Maybe don't worry about it too much. 
> 
> Also
> 
> Get ready for that E rating, kids. Soon. Soon...


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a little short but I think it's fun! Hopefully you will agree ;)

Only a short time after the Sarkas fiasco, Drift once again finds himself in a dire situation with a gun in his hand. A thick tension has broken out over the Weak Anthropic Principle; like in the war, there’s a tangible feeling in the air that one wrong step could get you shot.

And if you get shot, you’re out of the game.

Drift’s tactics for handling a last-man-standing gunfight have changed since his days as Deadlock. He might have once relished jumping in and open firing on a crowd, so confident in his own abilities that the idea of getting hit by someone else’s fire was unthinkable to him. That had indeed been something he’d done on the regular, and his reflexes were quick enough that he was able to get by with only a few scrapes rather than major wounds. It did very little to change how he approached fights, and he’d carried on like that until someone had shown him a different way altogether.

Drift channels Wing’s patience now. You could let your attacker come to you. They’d tire themselves out taking down other foes on the way to you, waste energy on obvious, fruitless attacks, giving you an opportune and easy moment to strike.

“Aw, what the hell, Krok,” he hears Misfire complain through the floor above him. “That was a cheap shot.”

“Corpses don’t talk,” Krok says back.

Drift snickers silently to himself, sneaking off down the halls towards a hatch leading upwards. He’s learned the layout of the ship by now, including all the shortcuts and roundabouts, depending if you want directness or cover if a game of Shoot Shoot Bang Bang breaks out. He opts for cover now, tip toe-ing down into the room, which appears empty but for Misfire’s ‘corpse.’ He dutifully lies still in death, save for his right hand, which seems to be pointing towards the bar.

Drift ducks behind the couch, peeking up and aiming his gun bar-wards. “I know you’re back there, Krok.”

“Misfire, you _aft!_ ”

There’s snickering from the floor.

“It’s just me and you, Krok! We can either sit out this stalemate until _Newtopia Rising_ comes on in three hours, in which case we both know I _will_ get you, or you come up now and have a _chance_ to beat me.”

“Do your stupid count!” Krok shouts.

“I’m going to count to three…” Drift warns, preparing his finger over the trigger of his gun. He’ll aim for the head this time, he thinks. “One… Two… Three!”

He leaps up to an empty bar and hears Krok mutter. “Wait, was it on, or— Ack!” The strategist peeks up belatedly, rhythm entirely thrown off, and fires his gun while still crouched behind the bar.

The rubber dart catches Drift right in the gut and his shoulders slump immediately. “Aw.”

“Booooooo,” Misfire howls from the floor, rising slowly by hinging at the waist with his hands framing his mouth. “Cheap shot! Cheap shot! Come on Drift, chant with me. _Cheap shot!_ ”

“I didn’t know if it was on or after three!” Krok protests, shrugging out his shoulders defensively. “Whatever, game’s over.” He tosses his gun onto the bar

Drift tugs the rubber dart off his plating, rubbing at the spot it had suctioned to. “That was a cheap shot,” he agrees, continuing in a casual tone. “It’s cool though, I’ll pray for you that you stop being such a sore loser that you have to cheat.” He presses his palms together and smiles, bowing just slightly.

Krok, if he had a mouth, would be smirking despite Drift’s ribbing. “You can’t _cheat_ at Shoot Shoot Bang Bang. I shot you, you died, I win. That’s it. The sore loser here is you.”

“You owe me 500 shanix!” Crankcase says, appearing from around the corner, pointing in an accusatory manner at Krok.

“That’s _not_ how trademarks work!” Fulcrum calls, unseen, from further down the hall.

Spinister tumbles into the room, sticks the landing, and fires a dart square over Misfire’s spark. “I win, ha.”

Misfire rips the dart off his chest and throws it back at Spinister, where it plunks uselessly off his thick helm. “The game’s already over, _pinhead_ , Crankcase shot you round one.”

Spinister rises off his knee, examining his dart gun. “I thought you and Fulcrum tag teamed Crankcase at the start…”

“That was when we played _yesterday._ ”

Drift sets his dart gun down on the table and starts backing towards the doorway. “I’m gonna go work on my shuttle. Good game, though.”

Crankcase and Krok continue arguing about trademarks while Spinister supposedly tries to piece together what day it is. Misfire, however, leaps over the couch and trots after Drift. “Hey, wait up, I’ll come with you.”

They fall into step in the hall. “Thanks for the tip,” Drift says to Misfire, now that they’re out of Krok’s earshot. “I thought I had him.”

“Avenge me next time,” Misfire shrugs. “Or I’ll avenge you. I dunno. What I’m saying is maybe we should team up and take Krok out before he can take any more opportunities to blatantly and definitely _cheat_.”

Drift grins. “Sounds good, but don’t think I won’t turn on you at the end. Lots of practice.” He taps his badgeless chest pointedly.

“Good point. It’s always the pretty ones you gotta watch out for.”

Drift’s smirk softens to a smile and he turns his head forward, tipping it down a bit.

“Aw, come on. Don’t be weird. Can’t a guy tell his friend he’s pretty sometimes without it being weird?” Misfire sounds embarrassed. He laces his fingers together behind his helm so Drift can’t see his face with his arm is in the way.

Drift laughs a little. “No, I just— Sorry. Thank you. I think.”

“What’s there to think about? It’s just the way it is.”

Drift’s smile deepens again. “Well then, thanks, Misfire, I think you’re pretty too.”

“Whoa,” Misfire says, dropping his arms from his helm. “Are you flirting with me or something?” He holds up his hands to Drift in mock repulsion.

Drift laughs and elbows him. “Don’t be an aft.” He’s fairly certain by now they’re flirting with _each other,_ which is fine with him. It doesn’t have to mean anything, and it’s fun. He’s not actually bothered by Misfire calling him pretty, it just caught him off guard.

Misfire turns to him suddenly and says, “Hey, come see Grimlock with me.”

“What?” Drift asks, genuinely confused by the abrupt change in topic. “I mean, I could, I guess.”

“Your shuttle can wait another hour.”

“Yeah, it can,” Drift says evasively.

“He’s mellowed out a lot since we picked him up,” Misfire tells him, guessing the reason for Drift’s hesitation. “I think he might have been disoriented, and now he just seems bored. I’m trying to like, teach him to read and stuff.”

Drift gives a light little laugh. “ _You_ can read?” He can’t resist teasing him.

“Wow!” Misfire clutches at his fuel pump as if Drift had kicked him. “A low blow! Now that flirting hasn’t gotten him where he wanted it to, Drift resorts to _negging_.” He clucks his tongue with mock disapproval.

Drift laughs again, enjoying the amicable energy between him and Misfire. It took a while, but he’s starting to feel more comfortable on the WAP, and it would probably be remiss to not attribute a big part of that to him. “Okay, sure. Let’s go see Grimlock.”

.

.

.

Misfire knocks at the door of Grimlock’s room and they wait, though for what, Drift isn’t sure. Eventually he hears a soft snort and some heavy footsteps, and Misfire cracks open the door, peeking in, then pushing it open for them to enter.

Drift hesitates. He’s seen Grimlock a few other times, but that was mostly from him breaking out of his room and rampaging around the ship. Apparently, before Drift had showed up they’d typically just try to play dodge until he tired himself out when this happened. Drift, never being one to run from a fight (often when there wasn’t really a fight to run from), thought it seemed better to at least try to subdue him on his first incidence, without any prior warning. But realistically, he’d just up baiting the massive Dinobot to keep him from destroying too much of their vessel, or anyone else, while Misfire tried to pacify him from slung around his neck or clinging to his tail. Drift thought that of the two of them, he had the slightly better job. Slightly.

That really hasn’t happened for a while, so he chooses to have faith that Misfire understands Grimlock better than he does, as bizarre as that statement would be to say out loud. But he’s heard from the other members of the crew that there have been moments of quietude where Grimlock is mysteriously unbothered by the company of others and coexists with them quietly and peacefully. It could reasonably follow that during his prolonged stay with them, he’s becoming accustomed to their presence. That may extend to Drift as well, given he’s been a fixture aboard the ship for a little while now.

“Heyyy Grimsy,” Misfire says softly, crouching into the room, though still obviously preparing himself to duck back out. Drift hovers behind him, hands instinctively on his swords. He spies the Dinobot lurking in the shadows of the poorly lit room, which, Drift realizes, is only that way because Grimlock has smashed out a good portion of the lights in here. He’s in his alt-mode, and Drift can see his eyes glinting, but he doesn’t charge. He hears a snort.

“Good, Grimsy, nice and easy.” Misfire straightens up a little bit and approaches Grimlock, who snorts again, louder this time. Drift is aware that Grimlock’s eyes are fixed on him, and he still hovers near the door, thumbs poised over the hilt of his blades.

Misfire turns away from Grimlock and looks at Drift, taking in his tense stature. “Drift, come on, don’t make him think you’re going to attack him.” He says this at a normal volume, which Drift thinks somewhat invalidates the soft tone he’d been using when directing himself towards Grimlock, but the Dinobot stays still, lurking, watching.

“Sorry,” Drift says, and hesitantly forces himself to straighten his spine, flatten his heels, and drop his hands from his weapons. “Hey, Grimlock,” he tries to wave.

Grimlock snorts again and takes a step backwards, which is not encouraging. He looks even more sinister the darker the lighting gets around him, the brighter his eyes glow.

“See?” Misfire says brightly. “He’s fine!” He moves off to the side to where there’s a table and starts pushing it to the center of the room. It makes a horrible, screeching noise that _definitely_ rejects the entire concept of soothing, and Drift hurries forward to lift the other end so Misfire will stop pushing making that noise for his own sake. He comes right up to the side of Grimlock in doing so, and is acutely aware of this fact, but hopes his sacrifice of his safety buffer will earn him some good grace, because he can’t imagine anyone is enjoying the sound.

“Thanks!” Misfire says, going to lift a few chairs to place around the table. “Sorry buddy, you’re gonna have to stand,” he tells Grimlock, who couldn’t possibly bend his legs as a dinosaur to fit in the chairs anyway. He motions for Drift to sit and starts rummaging around in the drawer of the table, which Drift now realizes is actually a desk.

He pulls out a simple drawing scrib and places it on the table, holding a stylus in his hand. “Okay, Grimsy, since you smashed my datapad with the book we were reading and Crankcase won’t let me borrow his, you’re gonna have to wait until I can find something else. So today we’re learning shapes.”

“Do you really think he doesn’t understand shapes?” Drift asks from his precarious position at the edge of the table.

“I don’t know what he understands and what he doesn’t. He never talks. Other than ‘Me Grimlock.’” Misfire starts sketching some stuff onto the square. “I was trying to teach him to write his name, but I can’t get him to respond, so I’m gonna save that for later.” Misfire finishes writing on the scrib. “Okay, this is a triangle. It’s got three sides.” He pauses, and looks at Drift. “What else is interesting about triangles?”

“I think you covered all the basics,” Drift says, shrugging.

“Try to draw one, like that, right here.” Misfire offers Grimlock the stylus and pushes the scrib towards him. Grimlock takes the little pen in his clawed hand and eyes the scrib. There’s a long silence where nothing happens. “C’mon, buddy, make a triangle. Three sides. You’ve got this.”

Grimlock snorts onto the scrib, splattering tiny droplets of fuel residue onto the formerly pristine surface.

“Aw, gross.” Misfire takes the scrib back and wipes it off with a cloth that was inside the drawer of the desk. Grimlock drops the stylus back onto the table, and it rolls towards the edge. Drift grabs it before it can fall.

“Uh, can I try?” he asks Misfire, holding out his hand for the scrib.

“Sure.” Misfire grins and hands him the scrib, planting his elbows on the table and lacing his fingers under his chin.

Drift writes a big A on the scrib and pauses. He turns towards Grimlock. “This is ‘A.’ A is for…” Drift casts around for something that starts with A. Nothing in the room provides much inspiration.

“Autobot?” Misfire suggests, still smiling.

“Sure,” Drift admits, feeling very silly. “A is for Autobot, like you.” It feels a little strange that he can’t include himself in this category any longer, but it doesn’t really seem like that matters much around this crowd anyway.

“Try it, Grimsy,” Misfire says. “Me Grimlock, _Au-to-bot!_ ” He does a very apt impression of Grimlock, lowering his voice significantly and lifting his hands from the table to curl them around the sides of his helm, sticking out his chest.

Grimlock immediately breaks into a low growl which Drift could swear is rattling the chairs they’re sitting on.

Misfire drops his arms quickly. “Okay, no Autobots. I’m not the biggest fan either, although for some reason they seem to like me.” He shoots a look at Drift, which Drift takes to mean he’s thinking more of the trial than of Drift’s former associations. Drift isn’t sure Grimlock gets the joke, but he snorts again, which could be interpreted as appreciative.

Misfire turns towards Grimlock’s massive snout, which is hovering just behind him. “You wanna try something else or are you done?” Grimlock, of course, does not answer. Misfire raises the scrib again and waggles it in front of his face, and Grimlock growls again. “I guess that answers that question,” says Misfire, setting the scrib face-down on the table.

“You’re really done?” Drift asks. He’s actually grown accustomed to Grimlock’s massive, hovering presence behind him, and is feeling slightly less threatened considering the Dinobot has spent none of their time together today charging at him.

“Yeah, I think he gets overstimulated easily, so I don’t want to tire him out,” Misfire explains, reaching up to pat Grimlock on the snout. Grimlock snorts again and Misfire withdraws his hand, holding up the other in surrender. Grimlock eyes him for a moment, then turns around and trots off back to his dark corner, curling up and lying down to nap.

Drift is still watching Misfire. “You’re really perceptive,” he blurts out, not really thinking about it. Ironically, it’s something that’s just occurred to him as well.

“What?” Misfire looks back at him, shocked. “I dunno, I just, get it. You know? My focus is as bad as my aim, ha.”

“I’m glad you’re taking care of him,” Drift says, thinking of Wing. “I know it’s probably hard, but I think he needs it, and it seems like he trusts you more than anyone else around. It’s really good of you.”

“Oh, pfft,” Misfire scoffs, looking away. He’s definitely embarrassed this time. “You’ve definitely changed. Deadlock was never this mushy.”

Drift folds his arms over each other on the table and gazes thoughtfully towards the door, now stuck deeper in this train of thought than he’d intended to be. “Do you wish I was still like that?” He doesn’t ask with the intention of getting complimented. He genuinely wonders what Misfire thinks of them now that their relationship is so different. He’s not sure what answer he’s expecting.

Misfire is apparently not sure what answer to give. He screws up his face in thought. “I dunno, you talk more now I guess. And you’re not so—” He makes what’s probably supposed to be a scary face and holds his hands up like claws. Drift gets the meaning, but he’s a little tempted to laugh at how goofy Misfire looks. He drops the expression and makes a casual gesture, losing the humor of his pose. “Yanno?”

Drift looks down at the table, over to the scrib and the stylus lying discarded by Misfire’s hands. It seems almost unreal that they knew each other in a past life, or an iteration of one. It feels so far off and different from what it’s like now, and the distance from everything that happened between then and now is significant as well.

He’s not sure if he feels better or worse, to be honest. As Deadlock, he’d been so angry, but had sort of lost track of why. Life for him as a Decepticon hadn’t been too challenging, honestly, compared to what life had been like before. Megatron’s special interest in him had protected him up until the point where he put his foot too deep in it, and even then, apparently the leader of the Decepticons hadn’t given up on him.

He wouldn’t say it was more than he deserved, because he’s not keen on thinking of himself as deserving anything from Megatron now; anything he could offer, Drift isn’t interested in. But it was a different way to be, having the Decepticons to call home, and then the Lost Light, and now? He likes Misfire and Krok and everyone, and he does feel more comfortable here now, but there’s a part of him that still feels like a stranger in their home. He isn’t sure if any amount of life-saving or game-playing can really change that, and again, he’s not sure if he wants to. This is home, for now, but it feels temporary no matter how he looks at it.

“You’ve gone all quiet,” Misfire says, tapping his fingers against the table, wearing an amused smile.

“What? Sorry, spaced out.” Drift stands, only remembering Grimlock’s presence when he grunts through whatever level of recharge he’s become steeped in. “I should really go work on my shuttle.”

“Yeah, you should. Have you seen that thing? Looks like someone blew it up.”

Misfire is plainly very proud of his joke, moreso when Drift laughs. He watches him a moment and then stands up as well, scratching at the back of his helm.

“I mean,” he says slowly, “do you want any help with it?”

.

.

.

“Okay, so while I’m holding it you just have to plug it in right there— See the red cable?”

Drift and Misfire are elbow deep in the shuttle, and while Drift had originally thought someone with no experience repairing ships wouldn’t be of much use to him, it turns he can actually use the extra set of hands in trying to repair the fuel systems. A lot of the connections have water lines that intersect and branch out to different systems, and while some of the pipes are still usable, they’ve been warped out of place and need to be wrestled with a bit.

“No—ack— I can’t see, all your freaking head kibble’s in the way— Turn your head— Yeah, like that.”

Drift feels his plating heat as Misfire’s cheek presses firmly against his own. They’re already shoulder to shoulder, in the vertical kind of sense, with Drift bracing the pipes and Misfire’s hands reaching in between the gaps. He tries to ignore that it’s kind of pleasant to have the solid touch of another mech against himself, given that this is _certainly_ not the time or place for it.

“Okay, I see it.”

“So, connect them,” Drift repeats after a noticeable beat, unsure if it’s him that’s distracted, or Misfire.

Misfire hums in thought, staring into the small space. His hands move together and eventually block Drift’s view, but the piping shakes as if he’s made contact and is screwing together the connection. Nothing happens, which Drift supposes is maybe good. He was half expecting it to explode.

But Misfire draws his hands back and the connection is there, and the piping is steady now as Drift pulls back as well. They squeeze out of the opening and Drift smiles at it. “Okay! I think that’s good!” He turns to Misfire, who’s still really close to him, meeting his optics. He notices, not for the first time, Misfire has nice features.

Drift moves back away from the hull of the ship, giving himself some space before his field gives him away. “Anyway, thanks!”

Fulcrum appears in the doorway, possibly saving them from awkwardness. “Aw, what? Are you done?” He moves over to them as Misfire stands.

Drift turns towards the shuttle, then looks over to the now-depleted pile of his salvaged parts, which had been meager to begin with. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, we could remove all the damaged paneling. That’s not hard, it’s just boring.” Drift turns to look at Fulcrum. “What, were you going to help?”

“I thought I could cheer you guys on with a little project manager pep.” He waves his hands in tiny circles.

“That’s not my understanding of what project managers do,” Drift says with a smile.

Fulcrum waves a hand dismissively. “I’m retired, anyway. Pass me a riveter.”

Drift does so, picking up another and offering it to Misfire, who steps in closer than he might need to in order to take it and brushes past Drift moving back towards the shuttle with a small but dangerous smirk. He takes his own riveter and moves over to the opposite side to work on the outer hull, while Fulcrum busies himself with the floor around where the seat had once been.

Drift is given a moment of quiet to puzzle over a recurring theme of today, or if he’s more honest, the past few weeks where he’s been sharing little glances and small interactions with Misfire. He’s fine with a little flirting, of course, but there’s always a little bit of a political system to traverse on any ship with more than one inhabitant. He can easily see these interactions getting out of hand and putting a negative light on him if he were more public about them, but there’s a bigger and more obvious problem.

He doesn’t know if Misfire’s interest is casual or genuine, and while he might not be opposed either way, that feels dangerous too. Drift is a little reliant on the WAP right now for getting him back in a position where he can use his shuttle to get around, and he doesn’t want to step on any toes, whether that’s someone outside of their involvement or the potential for the kind of mess that seems to follow most of his relationships.

It feels a little self-involved to even be thinking about this. Of course, after everything that happened on the Lost Light, after everything with Rodimus, he’s not interested in a relationship of any kind right now. It almost embarasses him to be entertaining the prospect, especially given his history with Misfire is in two radically different parts, and there might still be some things to unpack there, even if Misfire claims it’s all water under the bridge. But this isn’t a good thought to entertain, so he doubles down on his work and pushes thoughts of Misfire from his mind.

For many minutes, it’s quiet but for the sound of riveters whirring against the helm, until Fulcrum finally breaks it. “Ha. I think I found your secret compartment, Misfire,” he says, wrenching the panel he’d been working on the rest of the way free. He reaches in and pulls out a bottle, somehow completely intact, of engex.

“Someone’s been holding out on us,” Misfire says, taking the bottle from Fulcrum to examine it and looking giddy.

“I swear I had no idea that was there,” Drift says, feeling a bit gleeful himself. “A bunch of people used this shuttle before me. Maybe it’s Trailcutter’s…” He scoots a little closer to check out the panel and realizes that’s where the data block storing energy signatures was _supposed_ to be. That explains that question Dammit, Trailcutter.

“Solar Flair? I’ve never heard of this brand,” Fulcrum says, taking it back. He turns it over to the back and scans the label. “Primus, this is almost pure kerosene.” He whistles and starts unscrewing the cap.

Misfire snickers, elbowing Fulcrum. “Can K-Class even drink kerosene? I bet you’re a real lightweight.”

Fulcrum ignores him and takes a hearty swig. “Ooh, it’s sweet.” He wipes his mouth. “That is… Very good.” He giggles a little.

“Shouldn’t we share it?” Drift asks, turning towards the door.

“Finders keepers,” Misfire says, taking the bottle from Fulcrum and giving the vapors an appreciative sniff before he puts it to his own lips. He chugs down a fair amount of it, finally tipping down and swallowing with a gasp. “Damn,” he says appreciatively, wiping his mouth. He straightens up after a moment and points the bottle towards Drift, offering. “It was on your ship,” he says.

Drift takes the bottle and examines it. It really hasn’t been too long away from access to alcohol whenever he wants it, and he’s not much of a drinker anyway, but Drift’s mouth is watering just looking at the well-filtered pink liquid sloshing around inside. He can imagine Misfire and Fulcrum would probably be pretty entertaining to get drunk with, even if he feels a little guilty holding out on the others just because it doesn’t quite seem fair. But again, there’s a certain dynamic in this ship that does seem to imply ‘finders keepers’ would be the rule of law.

And maybe no one else has to know. He turns around scanning the room, listening for footsteps in the hallway, and hears and sees nothing. He turns back to Misfire and Fulcrum, decided. “Does the cargo bay door lock?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy
> 
> Here it is
> 
> I say that like this was hotly anticipated but tbh I'm not sure if it was. Basically shit gets a lot gayer here on out, but hopefully if you're reading this that's? Something you're into?

In under an hour, they’re drunk on the floor. The engex is potent and hits them fast; they’d finished off the bottle within the first ten minutes, with Fulcrum and Drift mostly trying to to match Misfire’s pace and following his example of chugging as a result. 

Drift loses his will to stand somewhere around the half-hour mark, if he’s being generous and pretending he’s been keeping track of time. He doesn’t admit that kerosene is a little rough for him, and it doesn’t seem like he has to either. Pretty soon the three of them are all lying in a pile on the floor of the shuttle amidst screws and wires and debris in a tangle of useless limbs. He lies very still and tries to pick out the detail of the ruined ceiling of the craft while the three of them slur drunken words at each other.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this drunk before,” Drift admits to them. He feels himself spinning and spreads his hands out a little bit for anchors, encountering Misfire and Fulcrum’s still arms next to him. 

“You have,” Misfire drawls back. “Remember when you jacked some of Megatron’s private stash and then we thought it would be a good idea to sneak inside Astrotrain and cover the floor with slow-drying adhesive so the guys getting shipped out would stick? And then we were too drunk so we passed out and got stuck instead?”

“Oh my god,” Fulcrum says, in awe as he starts laughing uncontrollably.

Drift groans and puts his hands over his face. “Okay, yeah, I remember that.” He drops his hands. “In our defense, that’s what he gets for recharging in his alt mode. He made it too easy.”

“I think Thundercracker and Skywarp had been messing with him, I feel kinda bad,” Misfire says, the sincere sound of his remorse somewhat ruined by the tone of the alcohol. 

“Well, we definitely paid the price,” Drift remarks sullenly. That had been one of the few occasions his status as one of Megatron’s favorites hadn’t gotten him off the hook.

Misfire goes a little quiet too, remembering. “Yeah, we sure did.” Fulcrum is still laughing and he rolls up against Drift’s side, clinging to him and slapping his hand against his plating.

“Glad you’re enjoying our pain,” Misfire grumbles. “Did you ever punk Deathsaurus?”

Fulcrum sobers up halfway and tries to lift his helm to give Misfire an incredulous look, and only half succeeds on both counts. “Are you kidding? No way. I wasn’t even high up enough that I ever talked to him. I just saw him like, once, in the hallway.”

“Is it kind of weird, with all the eyes?” Misfire wants to know, waving his hand in a vague gesture around his own face as if that’ll help explain what eyes are to anyone who might have been wondering.

“I dunno.” Fulcrum hasn’t extricated himself from Drift’s side, which is preventing him from being part of the conversation because he’s distracted by how nice it is to have the heat of another mech against his side.

“He’s really big, right? Bigger or smaller than Megatron?” 

“Uhhhh.” Drift suspects Fulcrum has closed his eyes when his helm lies just above his t-cog. The plating on Drift’s abdomen twitches with the vibrations from his speech. “I don’t remember. He’s big. Bigger than Spinister.”

“Spinister’s not  _ that _ big,” Misfire says, suddenly sounding a little sour. Drift has noticed he likes to contest Spinister’s relative Bigness whenever it’s brought up, which he suspects might have something to do with Spinister being the only one on the WAP bigger than him. 

“Hey.” Drift turns his head in a jerky, drunken movement to try to squint up at him. Misfire’s recovered from his brief sulk and is now grinning. “Who’s the biggest mech you guys’ve ever been with?”

Drift frowns, answering immediately. “Megatron.”

Misfire and Fulcrum both sit up in a flash. Fulcrum seems more alert than he has the past few minutes, but Misfire stumbles onto him a little, his hand landing on Drift’s thigh. “You’re joking,” Fulcrum says.

“You’re  _ lying, _ ” Misfire insists.

“Wait…” Drift props himself up on his elbows because with two mechs peering over him he feels like he’s in surgery, and it’s putting him off. “I thought you knew?” he directs this towards Misfire, who seems to be running a lot of very fast and sloppy calculations.

“I didn’t know! Are you seriously not joking?” 

“Now I wish I hadn’t said anything,” Drift sighs, leaning back down and covering his heating faceplates with his hands again.

“Was he good?” Fulcrum wants to know. Misfire gives him a look. “What? I want to know if there’s something to the rumor.”

“What rumor…?” Drift asks suspiciously. 

“That a bunch of Decepticons only joined because they wanted to get with Megatron.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that,” Misfire says. “Starscream.”

“Naturally,” Fulcrum agrees.

“Soundwave.” Misfire is counting off on his fingers now. “Overlord.”

“Tarn.” They’re having way too much fun.

“ _ God,” _ Drift groans, feeling his whole body heat from the combination of engex and this ridiculous conversation. “That’s not a thing. Except for Tarn.”

“Hey, Fulcrum.” Drift’s face is still covered but he can hear the smirk in Misfire’s voice. They’re both still hovering over him, with Misfire’s hand on his thigh and Fulcrum’s just above his hip, and Drift thinks he’s probably dying. “Would you?” He asks.

“Would I what?” Fulcrum seems to have remembered that he’s drunk. 

“With Megatron. Would you?” 

Fulcrum splutters. “No, are you kidding me? I enjoy being in one piece, thanks.” He pauses a second while Misfire snickers. “Okay, smart aft, would you?”

“Dunno, he’s not really my type,” Misfire says casually. “But maybe if he was really good. Drift, you still haven’t answered that question.”

Drift groans again. “Primus, please help me. Yeah, he’s good,” (very good, Drift recalls, with an almost painful and definitely unwelcome twinge in his array), “but I’m not exactly proud of it. Can we stop talking about this?”

“Okay, but just one more question,” Misfire protests. “How long did it take you to—”

Drift grabs Misfire by the wing and Fulcrum by the arm and tugs them both back down to the shuttle floor as he says, “No more questions!”

Misfire wriggles around when Drift grabs him by the wing, apparently ticklish, but when they settle, he finds himself with his his helm nestled against Misfire’s shoulder, and Fulcrum once again draped over his abdomen. It’s very warm and pleasant, and once they settle, Drift feels contented, buzzed, and on the verge of slipping comfortably into recharge.

“I mean, I’m impressed,” Fulcrum says after a beat of silence, patting Drift’s slim waist appreciatively. Misfire is wracked with laughter once again, and Drift opts to let them get their amusement out, as long as they don’t ask anything else too personal. 

The conversation gradually moves over to less regretful topics. Misfire and Drift recount a few more of their pranks to Fulcrum, who seems to be the most afflicted with lethargy thanks to the alcohol and does more listening than contributing. Eventually it ends up being mostly Drift and Misfire talking, with Misfire filling in a few gaps about what he’d done since Deadlock had phased out of his life, and how he’d ended up on the WAP. He tells the story again about the DJD, perhaps forgetting that Drift has already heard it, and Fulcrum may not be conscious, because he doesn’t offer any corrections.

Drift feels his own overcharge gradually fading as the hours pass, but what doesn’t fade is the comfort he feels being enveloped on either side by these two mechs. Since bringing up Megatron, he’s again entertaining his feelings for Misfire, enjoying the way his helm seems to fit nicely against the other mech’s shoulder, and the gradually smoothing cadence of his voice as he processes the engex out of his system as well. 

But with Fulcrum on his other side, Drift is feeling appreciative for his company as well. He’s remembering Fulcrum being the first one besides Misfire to really accept him, and as it seems like they’re sort of a package deal where friendship is concerned, Drift’s mind is twisting that romantic as well, just as a vague fantasy he might entertain in the confines of his mind. But they both seem to be comfortable with this casual contact as well, which is something he’s appreciative of. Drift has always appreciated the simple pleasure of touch, platonic or romantic, and he’s been feeling a bit starved in that department for a while. 

The conversation eventually dies down as the three of them sink into comfort, and eventually it becomes quiet for a long moment. Drift’s only vaguely aware of tracing circles into Fulcrum’s back with his fingertips, moving his wrist lazily as his thumb trails behind. It’s strange to notice there’s no rumbling of his engine or anything more than the machinery inside that they all share, but given Fulcrum’s alt mode, it makes sense. It’s a little eerie, but the soft buzz of his field creates a little bit of static to make up for the lack of sound, of motion. It makes it so Drift can hear his own engine a little better, purring at a low hum just on the edge of his conscious awareness. 

Fulcrum shifts his shoulders under Drift’s hand, and Drift moves it lower in response, guessing at his aim and obliging for the sake of this pleasant, tender moment they’re all sharing. He circles around the visible edge of Fulcrum’s spark chamber, a little window to his soul, literally, right through him. Drift has always liked the look of it. It seems fragile, though he knows it isn’t, but it kind of speaks to Fulcrum’s open type of personality in a kind of poetic manner. The window is warm under his fingers, and he feels Fulcrum give a pleased little shiver as he performs his ministrations. 

Drift’s other arm is curled around Misfire’s, tangled in such a way that Misfire’s fingers brush his wrist, and his hand hangs gently curled out of reach. He imagines he’d like to slide down lower, thread his fingers between the other mech’s, and he wonders if that would push the boundaries of what they’re doing here. He’s a little too comfortable to summon movement, anyway, and he slides his head forward a little deeper into the crook of Misfire’s plating. He feels his soft vents rumble through his intake, brushing against his finials as he expels them above his helm. He imagines all three of them have their optics shut and offline. Drift certainly does.

Drift isn’t sure how much time passes between when he’s aware of their frames lying together and when he wasn’t, but is brought back to focus when Fulcrum groans against him, shifting slowly up. 

“I’m gonna go recharge,” he says, raising a hand to his helm to steady himself as his optics online again and he tries to reconcile his balance with the gravity of the ship, and being upright.

“Just recharge here, idiot,” Misfire grumbles, not making much of a movement to get him to stay.

Drift is already lamenting the loss of heat against his side.

“It’s fun now, but it won’t be once the engex wears off,” Fulcrum says. “I’m gonna get a kink if I just lie here on the floor.” He stretches, testing to see if he already has one.

Drift lifts himself slightly off Misfire’s chest, watching as Fulcrum staggers down off the shuttle and towards the door. “D’you want us to come to bed with you?” He tries to process his own words. “I mean, take you there? Or—  _ Frag _ .” He drops his face into his hands.

Fulcrum laughs. “Stay, I’m fine. Goodnight.”

The door clicks as its shut, and Drift stares after it wistfully. Misfire shifts under him, slipping his arm out from between them and curling it around Drift, hugging him down to his chest so Drift is pressed fully up against his side now, pillowed under Misfire’s arm with most of their plating aligning. He has to admit, this is more comfortable. And now Misfire’s embrace is substituting Fulcrum’s loss, while the rest of him is solid and warm against his front. His field prickles with a bit of thrill, and this time he can’t stop it. Misfire wriggles slightly under him, again reminding him of Rodimus.

There’s a quiet moment where Drift thinks he might actually recharge, until Misfire gives a soft groan. “Okay, so I lied.” 

Drift slips his hand further across Misfire’s waist, curling around it and hugging Misfire back against him. He’s not sure he could summon the willpower to resist this contact if he wanted to. He feels warm and safe and at ease. It’s silent all around them, and Drift thinks of space spreading out infinitely outside the confines of the cargo bay. He thinks of the ship slipping uninhibited through nothingness—no matter, no air, just engines guiding it gently forward through the endless emptiness of everything. But he feels secure in Misfire’s arms, with Primus guiding their journey. “What did you lie about?” They’re speaking in whispers.

“I was flirting with you before.” 

Drift smiles, shakes once, just slightly with the low effort of a soundless laugh. He’s almost completely sober, but floor underneath him still feels like it’s spinning just a little, though he knows they’re still. “I don’t know that you ever denied it.”

“Huh,” Misfire taps a thoughtful finger against Drift’s plating. “And here I thought I was being subtle.”

The urge to laugh strikes Drift a little more fully this time, though still only manifests at its highest point as a giggle. He can’t think of a single time Misfire has ever been subtle, but before he can point it out, Misfire speaks again.

“Does this count as flirting, right now?” His fingers drum pleasantly over Drift’s waist, sending a shiver through him.

“I think this counts as cuddling,” Drift says, shifting himself deeper into the form of Misfire’s frame, not wanting to give it up and not wanting to deny it either. It would be a little silly to do so at this point, he thinks.

“Huh. You sure it’s not kissing?” 

Drift smiles against Misfire’s chest. He can feel his spark thrumming a little anxiously inside, and he caves. He’s had more scandalous flings before this. Before Rodimus, even. He lifts his head and peers at him for a moment, sure his expression is just a little sloppy with the fading dregs of overcharge and not as smug as he means it to look, but it still has the intended effect.

“What? I’m doing my best.” Misfire frowns, perhaps to keep a more vulnerable expression from creeping onto his features, easily observed at their close quarters.

This even fades back to neutrality, then something more hopeful as Drift scoots up closer against him, leaning more of his frame over Misfire’s so he can hover just above his lips, finally allowing his optics trace the shape of them. “Very smooth,” he says. Misfire smiles now, and Drift shutters his optics as he leans down and presses against him. 

Misfire responds enthusiastically, immediately opting for a hungrier kiss than Drift might have initiated himself, but he responds nonetheless, finding the hunger in himself without too much looking. After all, it’s been a long, lonely while and his frame is already heating, anticipating the touch of another mech,  _ having _ it even. Misfire’s hands curl around his back, running up his backstruts, exploring the shape of him, details not observable by polite company, or whatever else their little band passes for, and it feels wonderful. He swallows down a bit of emotion rising in his intake and dives deeper into their kiss.

It’s almost overwhelming. Even if this is nothing, and Drift isn’t sure that it’s not, he wouldn’t mind if it was. It’s still something for now, and it’s a different kind of feeling to be wanted after all those weeks of, well,  _ drifting _ through without solid direction or anchor. Even here he hadn’t felt like he belonged, and maybe he still doesn’t feel that, really, and a little fooling around of course isn’t going to change that  _ either _ , but… Well, the physical contact is grounding in a way, and the comforts of touch have often brought him back to awareness when he’s felt unhooked from the fabric of the universe. Maybe that’s an ineffective way to live, but Drift can’t help it. The effect is always the same, and he can’t force it to be rational if it simply isn’t.

He might have thought Misfire would kiss like Rodimus, since he’d been tallying up little similarities between them since his time in joining up with him after those centuries of absence. But the reality a sure reminder that they are indeed different. Which is good. Even the thought that it might have been comparable to the past is painful enough without the reality of it tainting this thing he quite frankly needs. 

They’re not really that similar. Rodimus could be a blurred mixture of aggressive and enthusiastic at his most intense, rarely ever slowing enough to truly approach tender, openness, awareness; while Misfire is a kind of mixture of awe, excitement, and surprising hesitance, likely out of a bizarrely placed desire to be polite. He comes off as wanting more than he’s taking, where Rodimus was usually of the opinion that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, though not to the point of anything that would truly impose on a boundary that the two of them hadn’t already agreed on. It simply left Drift’s lips feeling a bit bruised at times, which was a badge he’d worn with a quiet sort of pride at the time. 

But with Misfire, he keeps pushing back, using his denta against the other mech’s lips, nipping, squeezing between his teeth, not aiming to hurt, but to entice, and it’s working. His palms are growing warm where they rest on Misfire’s shoulders, as is his chest, all the way down. He shudders and wriggles on top of Misfire when his hand curls around the base of his helm, stroking along a sensitive spot behind his kibble, and he lets himself give a soft little moan. Misfire’s other hand traces the dip in his spinal strut, sending a chill through him as he draws a straight, purposeful line up through the groove. Drift ducks away from the kiss and vents into Misfire’s neck, trying not to get overly excited.

Misfire reboots his vocalizer. “Uh, Drift, do you want to—”

“Yes,” Drift says immediately, scrambling up and pulling Misfire up with him. He leans his palms against his shoulders again and presses another short kiss to his lips, their foreheads bumping together. 

“Wow,” Misfire says as Drift ushers him towards the wall of the shuttle. He’s sort of lost track of the haziness of wanting to recharge with this new opportunity presenting itself. “I kind of thought you weren’t interested. Wasn’t sure what to make of the, uh, cuddling. But I also wasn’t going to say no.”

Drift pauses, hovering with his legs slung over Misfire’s, kneeling above him with his hands on his chest now, feeling the faint fluttering of his spark beneath the plating, carried through on his field. “I am interested. But it’s...complicated,” he admits, moving his thumbs back and forth as a bit of an anxious need continued contact.

Misfire holds his hips, applying a gentle pressure for him to sink down again as he obviously watches his lips. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

Drift slides down and up against Misfire again, this time for a more snug, intimate fit. Their closed panels lie directly adjacent to each other, warm and taut with tension as they both resist letting them spring back—again, that politeness. He hooks his arms around Misfire’s neck and looks at him for a moment, trying to decide if he trusts him and realizing that he’s never given him a reason not to. “Okay,” he says, kissing him again. “Then it’s not.”

Kissing at this new angle of contact is making the charge growing in Drift’s core harder and harder to ignore. He experimentally grinds his plating against Misfire’s, earning a few sparks and a groan from the other mech, who tugs his hips closer to him in reply. Drift works his glossa against Misfire’s, his head still buzzing from the engex and making him a bit sloppy with his movements, he’s sure, but it also emboldens him a little through the slight hesitation he’s facing. He lets his panels slide back, exposing both his valve and his spike, and Misfire does the same as an almost immediate reaction.

Their spikes brush and Drift drives himself forward into the contact, guiding Misfire’s head with his hands to seal his mouth more firmly over his own. This doesn’t provide much in the way of gratification, but Drift immediately opts for dropping his arm between them to pin their equipment together, stretching the grip of his fingers and lifting his hips through the gap. This is much more satisfying, and elicits a rumbling groan from Misfire’s intake that mixes with his own sound. He can taste pleasure on Misfire’s lips, but even better is the building charge in his array as they thrust against each other, gleaning friction from the grind of their spikes and Drift’s fingers. 

He squeezes a bit harder, eager for more intense pleasure, and nearly loses his grip. Misfire stops flirting his hand along Drift’s back and slips it between them too, curling around their spikes and Drift’s hand as well to cage them into guaranteed sensation. 

He’s vocal, which is not especially surprising, but much of it comes off as breathy vents pushed through Drift’s lips and across his glossa as he leans forward and back to the ebb and flow of their somewhat hectic movements. Drift realizes he’s quickly become the aggressive one, guiding their pace and teasing out a stream of noises from Misfire’s vocalizer.

It’s nice, and it’s steady, but Drift is quickly realizing it’s not enough for him. He can overload with his spike fine, but his valve has been untouched by all but himself for so long, and he’s remembering with a growing hunger past exploits with other lovers, the distinct sensation of charge jumping across his internal nodes… He whimpers at the thought as his empty valve seizes and thrusts harder against Misfire’s spike. It feels a good size. Misfire’s a little bigger than him, and Drift wants it, even at the price of disrupting the flow they have here. Even as he moves, his valve drips with growing lubrication, positioned in such a way over Misfire’s legs that nothing rubs against it. Drift’s lips slip off Misfire’s and he squeezes his helm into his neck, waiting for the sole reason of teasing himself up a bit further.

“Hey,” Misfire nearly gasps into his audial, as they still move, “I have to tell you so-something.” His field quakes with a bustle of emotions too frantic for Drift to sort out, but all of them feel positive and stimulating against his own wanting field. 

Drift smirks a little deviously, sure Misfire will enjoy what he plans to do. He squeezes his frame up against Misfire’s chest as he slides up onto his knees again, keeping hold of Misfire’s spike as his arm is pushed out of the way, and guides the head of it against his valve, lining it up just right so he can sink back down onto it. 

Misfire gasps, train of thought completely derailed when he drives up into the slick, tight heat of Drift’s valve, and Drift gives his lewdest moan yet, leaning back and shifting his hips slightly until he feels the lips of his valve brush up against the base of Misfire’s frame. His calipers flutter happily, slowly ticking outward to adjust for the tightness. It is, definitely, a bigger stretch than he’d thought. He hadn’t been patient enough to stretch himself out at all, and there’s the slightest sting, but it’s nothing he wasn’t prepared for or wanting. It’s a pleasant reminder; it’s the promise of this friction as charge already flits between his static-stimulated nodes and Misfire’s solid spike. “What were you going to tell me?” he barely remembers to breathe out as he tries not to drown in satisfaction.

Misfire doesn’t stop his gasping little vents, wriggling up against Drift, where he’s held pinned by him to the wall and the floor. He’s suddenly at a loss for words in want of more charge flowing between them, now that they’re this close to something that could be so satisfying. His fingers twitch on Drift’s hips, squeezing and rubbing as he shifts, and Drift still keeps him there, enjoying with his weight and his strength and his will, enjoying the way his valve opens up more for him with these small, pleading movements his partner is making.

“Drift,” Misfire pants in a small, broken voice.

“No, go on, I interrupted you.” He flexes his valve experimentally and Misfire makes a strangled noise, helm rolling forward.

“Well I—hnnk—don’t remember now,  _ do I? _ ” he gasps in frustration again, and Drift is only barely managing to keep a straight face, because he probably wants it as bad as Misfire does, if not more. 

Still, he hums a little laugh, finally squeezing upwards through his core, keeping his valve clenched as he shifts upwards a little bit, feeling the tight but slick tolerance of their equipment locked together and dizzying himself a little bit in pleasure. Misfire chokes and grinds his face into the crook of Drift’s neck, heating it with the mere pressure of his plating. 

Drift scoots down again, draws up further, and down, making room for a rhythm of movement between them that Misfire eagerly fills. And soon he can’t focus enough to retain the tension, and his valve flexes automatically around Misfire’s thrusting. His arms squeeze around Drift, his abdomen lifts up towards Drift’s chest, and Drift feels surrounded by his warmth, and more than that a steady, sturdy pressure anchoring him here. Tension coils in him more from the force of the friction than actually hitting the correct nodes, but it’s maddeningly good anyway. Drift’s vocalizer streams soft wails on each thrust and he teeters on the edge of overload.

Misfire kisses and sucks at the cables in his neck with decreasing consistency, though the noises he makes come at the same rate of his pistoning hips. The raw edge of a little too much push, a little too much eagerness on his part is distracting him from the greater quantity of pleasure, and he briefly misses the window even as he feels transfluid spill into his valve. For a few sweet thrusts, he’s wet and sticky and the pleasure builds to a dizzyingly high point, but doesn’t break before Misfire eventually stills. 

Misfire gently disengages them and kisses Drift in the first attempt at chastity they’ve had, which Drift assumes is an apology, or embarrassment, but he’s a little bit beyond caring given how close he is, and how good it still feels to have Misfire’s arms wrapped around him, his hands tracing the seams of the panels in his back. His valve does still clench in prickling confusion and disappointment, but he’s determined to be patient. After all, the more times he comes down from the high, the better the eventual payoff is.

He moves against Misfire still, within the comforting confines of his arms, wrapping his hand around his own spike again even though he’s already established that’s not what he needs to get off tonight. It still feels nice, and keeps him edging around the promise of eventual overload. He just hopes Misfire’s not the kind of bot who’ll leave him to finish off himself, because he’s come at his own hand quite enough for the last few months to be interested in a change of roster.

Misfire’s hands still squeeze around him, roaming across his plating, coming down to his sides again. They move around the front, and Drift thinks for a moment he might push him back, so stops and leans away. Misfire’s staring at his chest with a bit of determination, or possibly confusion. Drift has realized that with Misfire, he’s not always able to sort the two correctly.

Trying to deny the urge to grind his fingers in between his legs, he puts his hands around Misfire’s wrists. “Can I help you?”

“Where’s your—” Misfire casts his optics over Drift’s frame in frustration, belatedly realizing Drift’s field is starting to tinge with a bit of concern. He glances back up to Drift’s face. “Um, ports?”

“Oh!” Drift is surprised, but not disappointed. It’s been a while since he’s met a mech interested in plugging in. Though it’s not unheard of, and can certainly be fun, some people are intimidated by the feedback, and the sensation of being partially or fully in two places at once. But that kind of thing doesn’t bother Drift, given his background, and thinking about what he knows of Misfire, it makes sense that he’d like a little plug ‘n’ play. Drift lets his fingers press into the hatch on the side of his chestplate, popping them open, and finds he’s a little excited to try this for the first time in a while. 

They shuffle around a moment as Misfire gets out from under him, unlatching his own panel and drawing his cord out. It glints innocently in his hand in the dim light of the cargo bay, but Drift has already preemptively adjusted to a scenario involving using it, and now can’t imagine being dissuaded. 

“Fragging… Opposite sides,” Misfire notes with a frown, tugging on his cable, which has reached its full extended length. “This should really be universal by now! S.M.H. at evolution…”

Drift smiles at Misfire’s use of yet another abbreviation in real speech, though that’s not his primary concern at the moment. His motivation has never flagged over positioning complications, and he finds easy inspiration in their compatibility issue. He’d already been lamenting the loss of Misfire’s arms around him, and thus views this situation is more of a blessing than a curse. “Wait, lean back again,” he says, guiding Misfire down. The ache in his valve has subsided from the brink of overload, but still burns inside him as a persistent reminder that it won’t be quieted without his attention. He turns himself around, settling in between Misfire’s legs with his back now pressed against the other mech and his helm tucked nicely just beside his chin.

Misfire settles into him now as well, his free hand landing on Drift’s chest plate over his spark and moving slowly downwards. Drift relaxes into his warmth and spreads his legs, his hands practically rattling against Misfire’s plating where they’re gripping his thighs. “You have  _ so many _ good ideas,” Misfire says, now teasing the jack of his cable around Drift’s port. It’s not typically a sensitive area, but he’s so acutely aware of that little space in him now that it aches to be filled nearly as much as his valve. 

He groans and anchors a pede into the floor of the shuttle to shove himself as tight up against Misfire as he can. “Show me what you really think of my ideas,” he murmurs, grabbing Misfire’s hand and guiding it down between his legs.

He’s not sure which happens first— Misfire plugging into him, locking them together, or Misfire squeezing three of his fingers into Drift’s already slick valve. The combined sensations threaten to offline him for a brief, frightening second where his being limits down to a few pins squeezed around a thicker connection, and freezing, burning charge zips through the link. It’s just one clock cycle, but it feels like it could have easily been a year. Then he’s again aware of his limbs, his helm, his back pressed against Misfire’s, and he can feel Misfire’s chest pressing against his back at the same time. And best of all, he can feel Misfire’s fingers pumping in and out of his valve, feel the curl of his fingers—Misfire’s fingers—the sensation of charge jumping back on his plating—from his nodes.

Drift lets out a wail that echoes almost imperceptibly against his audials, squeezing hard on Misfire’s thigh, gripping his wrist and riding it as it moves his hand in and out of him. The buzz of the engex feels like an echo too, inside his head, as he dimly experiences the silhouette of Misfire’s own consciousness. His overcharge rings through him, knocking his sense of balance off as he tries to orient the faint sensation of being in two places at once, as usually happens at the start of the link. 

The connection at his port pulses the double sensation of awareness over his entire being. He knows where he, Drift, is; but he can feel Misfire too, behind him, against him, in front of him. It doesn’t really matter, because it feels amazing. He isn’t sure if it’s the engex or if somehow it’s just  _ Misfire _ , but something in him is amplifying at a rapid rate.

Charge also settles in his neck, at the pinch point of Misfire’s chin against his shoulder, his helm leaning against his finial. The thrill ices his spine somewhere between his brain and his fuel tank and makes him feel nearly numb, though he’s aware he’s thrown his helm back to gasp out more moans. Drift’s frame is taut all along these points, charged for release. 

Misfire’s thrusting against the soft, sensitive part of his valve drives high and ebbs. He’s not opting for any particular kind of skill, just the stuffed sensation he’s gleaned Drift is after, and he lets the connection do the rest of the work. He must know the effect it’s having on Drift, but how could he not? Drift is pretty sure on some level that the whole ship can hear him, but his audials aren’t his own right now. The sensation in his valve has limited to just a portion of his growing arousal, though he’s dimly aware of the thick pressure and the bristling static in him. He feels it climb inexplicably high again in the next second. 

Gasping, Drift tries to relax his body the modicum necessary to reach the point of overload, while straining to keep himself tight enough to match the intensity that’s been building. He manages it, and the payoff is potent and immense, and when the charge breaks through him, it flows up through his neck and his arm and his core, spreading out over his limbs in an explosive, tingling rush. He doesn’t realize it’s over until the buzz of charge covering him starts to burn a bit hard, a bit grainy, preparing to become painful to warn against being plugged into another mech for too long. The overload begins to feed back into him and turn on itself, so he gropes for Misfire’s plug in him and gently detaches it after really ensuring he’s done.

Drift lies venting against Misfire’s form. Two of his auxiliary fans have burned themselves out, and his core temperature is running hot, but he is less than concerned. It’s no longer so comfortable, physically, to have Misfire’s warmth against him, but he seals his panels back up and turns in his lap anyway, wrapping his arms around Misfire’s torso. 

“That was fun,” Misfire says, sounding a bit too pleased with himself. 

There’s a lot Drift wants to say. He wants to confess how much he needed that. He wants to know if Misfire got a blowback overload from that link, given how intense it was for him. He wants to find out at what point he needs to stop clinging to him, if there is one. He wants to ask just how uncomplicated Misfire had meant this to be.

“Yeah,” is what he says instead, and he loses track of everything that happens between that moment and recharge.


End file.
